Bea gets back to Oz

We are back into the swing of things after our little holiday. Its remarkable how busy a mere 14 lessons a week can keep me.

Beatrice is HOME ... what an effort that proved to be! We started sending her home on Tuesday, and she finally got there about midnight on Friday. It all should have been so simple! But when we showed up at the airport in Zhengzhou at the right time according to the ticket, they said the plane had left 90minutes early and she'd missed it! Now, have you ever heard of a plane leaving early?? So, we wondered, where were the other angry passengers, or had they all been rung and informed? Our minder was very upset - it made her look bad. And Beatrice had to get to Beijing to connect with her international flight at 8.55 the next morning. (We had not bought the $150 travel insurance on her ticket - I don't think it would have helped in this case anyway.)

So we drove into Zhengzhou - the airport is about an hour away - while our minder got onto her mobile and rang all sorts of people. We found that there was a bus leaving at 8.30pm that would travel all night and get her to Beijing about 6am - but the bus station was a good hour away from the airport in Beijing, it would be touch and go if the bus was delayed at all. So we decided to give it a try. We spent the next five hours sitting in the bus station in Zhengzhou, while our minder went off and argued with her travel agents and got Bea's flight money back. It turned out that the flight had been cancelled - in fact four flights were cancelled that day - so if we had been there 90mins earlier she could not have got on that flight either. The travel agents were a bit peeved that they were expected to come up with a full refund, after all there were 20 disgruntled passengers and that was a lot of money to pay back. Our minder assured them angrily that if Bea missed her Beijing flight because of them she would be back demanding more money for compensation ... she was not a happy girl!

So Bea went on a sleeper bus to Beijing - a much nicer one than the one we traveled on to Dalian last year, only 20 beds instead of 30 so the beds were really big and comfy. When she got there they had arranged a taxi driver to whizz her across the city to the airport (for $157!) and made it in time for her flight.

BUT then they reckoned her name was not on the computer! They said, however that they could get her onto a flight all the way the following day ... you realize, this doesn't make sense: if she had no reservation at all, then they wouldn't be willing to just hand her a ticket for the next day! Then they told us that her flight had in fact been cancelled - and all this during the busy holiday period ... remarkable. We love the way they keep changing their stories. Of course, all this was done between our phone, our minder’s phone (she was in Zhengzhou and we were here) and Bea's phone and the airline phone - calls whizzing back and forth in English and Chinese. We emailed our Perth travel agent who had set up the whole trip, and she told us the flight was in fact overbooked and they were covering up for their mistake.

Anyhow, poor little Bea, all by herself in Beijing, had to book herself into a hotel overnight. She had originally been booked in for the night before, but not made it when she missed the plane and spent the night on the bus. So she had a phone number and they had her details in their computer - that helped a bit. She managed to contact them and someone actually spoke English a bit and sent a car to pick her up from the airport.

Her Chinese mobile phone is a "prepaid", and round about this time the money ran out on it. Fortunately, before she left, I had been feeling very worried about her being in Bali alone and so I gave her my Australian SIM card which has "International Roaming" so she could call from anywhere in the world. I was so glad of this! She was able to pop my SIM into her phone and keep in touch.

So she sat around in a hotel room for 24 hours and the next morning the man from the hotel dumped her back at the airport. I got a tearful phone call from her early the next morning - she was lost in the airport. Well, there wasn't anything we could do at this end except advise her to find someone in a uniform and ask for help, and sit down and pray for her. A little later she rang and said she was finally sitting at the right gate waiting for her plane. She had talked to a family of foreigners - who turned out to be French -and they were headed the same way as her. She had got lost because she went in a lift and pressed the button for the right floor, but the lift went somewhere else and she got out not realizing she was in the wrong place. A man had taken her to pay her airport tax - supposed to be $50 - and charged her $300 ... sounds like he scammed her fearfully! It’s hard to know what's going on when they gabble at you in a foreign language. But at least she was safe!

Then when she got to Bali someone told her she had to tip the taxi driver and he happily accepted $15AUD - quite outrageous considering the cost of transfer from airport to hotel was supposed to be covered in the ticket. He said for $20 he would drive her all around Bali the next day and show her the sights. But at this stage she was very, very tired. She had to check out of her hotel at noon, but her next flight wasn't until 8pm.

Anyway, she finally got home. A big crowd of her friends met her - a lot of loud excitable teenagers! And we felt that we could finally relax a little. Her brother hardly recognized her - she's lost heaps of weight, has new glasses and a new hairdo.