And finally the last segment of this holiday, Cebu Pacific Airbus A320 Clark to Hong Kong.
- Introduction
- The booking process
- Hong Kong – Clark with Cebu Pacific economy class
- Clark – Doha with Qatar Airways Boeing 787-8 business class
- Stopover in Doha with Oryx Rotana review
- Doha – Stockholm with Qatar Airways Airbus A359 business class
- Stockholm – Oslo with SAS business class
- Holiday in Norway with the kids.
- Torp – Copenhagen with Wideroe economy class
- Copenhagen – Doha with Qatar Airways Boeing 777 ‘old’ business class
- Stopover in Doha
- Doha – Angeles Qatar Airways Boeing 787-8 business class
- Angels – Hong Kong with Cebu Pacific economy class.
Heading back to Clark airport only 10 hours after I landed in Clark, I only had time for a dinner and nap, before my service picked me up at 04.30 for my 06.30 departure. As always my driver was on time, and I arrived at the airport at 04.45. Then to enter the airport I had to show my ticket and passport, before all bags were screened.
Then I had to fall in line for check-in, which went fairly quickly, and then fall in line to pay the terminal fee of 600 pesos. Then fall in line for immigration, before there is a new line for a 2nd security screening. Then after this there is another line, where airline representatives check your boardingpass and passport, and writes it down on a list to see what passengers has passed through immigration (I guess this makes sense as a lot of Filippinos are refused travel by immigration, so the number of people checked in and actually travelling can be different.)
Boarding started on time, and I quickly found my seat, 14A. The space between normal seat rows is not good for someone who is 186 cm tall, so I always pay extra to get the emergency seat row on Cebu Pacific.
Pushback was on time, and after a short taxi we departed around 06.45. As always, I quickly fell asleep on this flight (I did deserve it though, having basically been traveling for 40 hours by now).
I believe the flight was uneventful, and we landed in Hong Kong at 08.30 local time, just on schedule. Immigration and baggage reclaim was done within minutes of arriving, and I had time to go home and take a nap before I started work at 14:45 that afternoon.
Overall it had been a great holiday, but a lot of travel. Only having 13 days leave and going to the Philippines to pick up and drop off the kids when traveling to Norway takes a lot of time, but I don’t see I have much choice, as having a rest day in each direction would cause us to only have 6 days in Norway which is not enough when you are traveling so far.
The kids were awesome, did not suffer from jet-lag at all (I belive my experience working shifts helps with that, I normally find a way to get them on local time within 24 hours of changing time zones. Being used to adjust my own sleep pattern all the time has thought me a lot of tricks on how to do it, so not worried about that any more). Of course, also having lie-flat seats and flying business class for most of the legs are a big bonus too, and makes everything so much easier.
Only thing I think I would do different in the future is to have a longer holiday when traveling that far, loosing 4 days to traveling gives us only a few days at destination, so I think in the future I will try to have at least 3 weeks off when flying half way across the world with the kids.