Our morning flight home was departing 8:50AM from Incheon International Airport Terminal 1. Our hotel was providing complimentary shuttle bus services for guests to both of the airport’s terminals, with the first bus leaving at 6AM. We’d thought that this would be an uneventful ride to the airport, but the actual ride encountered two issues. Firstly, it turned out that there were many guests needing that first departing bus at 6AM. The bus was fully packed with guests who were all taking flights from terminal 1 – so much so that there wasn’t enough space in the luggage compartment to store all of the guest luggage. That necessitated the driver to place luggage in the aisles between passenger rows, which would had been real dangerous had there been a vehicle accident on our way to the airport!
Secondly, for some reason, the bus driver dropped us off at the arrivals instead of the departures floor. I wondered why. But that we were not at departures required us to make our way up a few floors. The SQ check-in row was also near the other end of the terminal, and the Incheon airport terminal is huge i.e. more walking to get to where we needed to check into our flight.
The departure area of Incheon airport was really busy on this Christmas eve morning, but crowd lines moved fast enough as there were multiple officers working the differet areas: at the check-in counters, entering the departure lounge, baggage check, and finally immigration clearance. Nothing like the US airports in Los Angeles and Arizona during a recent work trip in October this year where the whole check-in and boarding process from start to end was really stressful. My business party over our trip at various points was told off impatiently to go join a queue that was actually not the right one, processed by immigration officers who were fully armed and wearing body armor, and a boarding process from TSA officers that felt like we were being treated as criminal suspects. Ok, so they were doing their jobs, but it wouldn’t had cost them anything to be a bit nicer to already stressed out passengers.
The departure lounge at Incheon itself also has a large number of dining places, including a foodcourt. Thing is, everyone seemed to have the same idea of getting relatively cheaper eats at the foodcourt, so it was particularly congested.
One more minor drama while at our boarding gate: a passenger on our flight tried to carry-on what looked like way more than his allowance: he had a full-sized backpack, a cabin-sized hard luggage case, what about 6 bags more of duty-free goods. The boarding gate staff requested that he check-in some of those items. Which he dutifully complied, but that in itself required several staff’s attention, which ended up delaying the boarding process.
Our flight was supposed to depart at 8:50AM and ended up only doing so at 9:25AM. The flight itself was uneventul. The photos from the air though were a really mixed bag: I forgot we were flying in a general southerly direction, and that the sun would be facing the left side of the aircraft… and my window seat is on the left LOL. So, the pictures while the plane were ascending had a fair bit of post processing as there was a maddeningly amount of glare and also haze to deal with.
Our flight landed at 2:30PM as scheduled. It felt good to be back in the land of roti-prata, economical rice-veg, chicken rice, and bak chor noodles. 18 days has been quite enough for a vacation: and certainly enough for us to miss having street food that costs just SGD4-5 that is yummy and constituting a balanced meal.
Next posts are our itinerary summary and also final notes posts!