[Itinerary Page]The Daily Diary of a Wandering Restaurateur
May 12 - The Long Road Home
At the outset I should say that while every driver we have had on the trip had their own peculiarities, all of them were most accommodating and eager to please ... that is, until this morning. So let me tell you the tale, not to complain but just because I found it so unbelievable!
Through a local travel agent, Miao had arranged for a driver to take us to the airport. I should have expected trouble when he didn't pull up to the hotel entrance where we were all waiting, but parked in the lot and just waitied. Apparently he expected us to drag the bags down to the car. But you don't want to mess with Miao and she quickly talked him past that little huff. Then he insisted on being paid before he left the hotel rather than at the airport like every other driver. Are you starting to sense that he was not having a good day?
It was a hot morning, so we asked him to turn on the air conditioning in the van. He refused, saying that he wasn't being paid enough to do that. Even though he had contracted with the travel agent to drive us for that price, even Miao couldn't get him to relent. So we did the best we could with what we had to work with ... and wished that there were windows in the back of the van that could be opened!
I remember the ride into town from the airport as being fairly smooth with good roads all the way -- even a section of four lane toll road. So when we suddenly turned onto a long section of unpaved roadway I got confused. It reminded me of the twenty miles of dirt and rocks we had to drive over on the Costa Rican coast. As we bounced along, we were making slow progress, our flight time was getting closer and we were getting increasingly nervous.
Ten or fifteen minutes of this and it suddenly dawned on us -- he was taking this "shortcut" (and bouncing us all over the van) to avoid the toll booth on the highway! After all, he was being paid a flat fee ... and "not enough" at that! In all my travels, I never ran into an attitude like that. Even the people that were ripping us off were more courteous! In any event, we made our flight on time and in the end, I guess we all got a good story to tell!
As an aside: it is worth noting that horror stories like this have a lot more "street life" than any advertising message. You can never afford to allow your business to become a case study in what NOT to do. Pay close attention to the details and have zero tolerance for lapses in judgement.
After a short wait in Guilin, we said goodbye to Marv and Miao, both of whom were headed in separate directions today. He was off to Guangzhou to be a bachelor for the night. She was flying to her home town of Shenyang (north of Beijing) to pick up her 14-year old son and bring him to Guangzhou for a meeting with US Immigration. Their hope is to get permission for him to come to live with them in the US. It sounds easy, but nothing like this ever is.
For us it was an hour flight to Shenzhen, a two-hour bus ride to Hong Kong and a six-hour wait at the airport. We had both been to Hong Kong before and while there have been some big changes, it was just too hot and too much of a hassle to try walking around the city. The ten-hour flight to San Francisco was in business class on the upper deck of a Singapore Airlines 747 -- a lovely way to fly even if we slept most of the way across. I thought it was interesting that we arrived in SF four hours BEFORE we left Hong Kong!
For once, Immigration and Customs was a breeze and after a short wait, it was a two-hour hop to Seattle, arriving shortly after midnight. We got home about 2:00am and finally got horizontal about 3:00. After many painful nights on rock hard Chinese hotel beds, I slept well (got to love sleeping in your own bed!) and felt fairly focused in the morning, so perhaps an Ambien on the plane did the trick again as far as jet lag goes.
Now comes the seemingly endless process of sorting through three weeks of accumulated mail, re-nesting and generally getting back in the routine. It is about 60 degrees with light rain today so I had to turn the heat back on ... in mid-May! Now I know we are back in Washington!
© 2008 Restaurant Doctor