Trip Report from the Philippines and China
So I just returned from a week in the Philippines, the 2nd of 3 business trips that also include last month's trip to Frankfurt and January's trip to South Africa. The trip went very well, but included a major delay coming home when my 4 hour layover in Beijing's airport turned into 20 hours when my plane, while taxiing to the runway, suddenly turned around and was escorted by fire engines to an isolated area of the airport. It turned out that the plane had a burning smell in the cabin, which was later diagnosed as an oil leak in the left engine. After four hours and an aborted bus ride back to the plane when they'd mistakenly thought they'd fixed the problem, United finally canceled the flight and put us up in a hotel overnight in downtown Beijing. It was quite the adventure! United wasn't very good at keeping us informed as to what was going on, and by the time we actually got to the hotel, it was 1:30am and nobody had eaten dinner. After a light dinner at 2am in the hotel's coffee shop, I finally got to bed at 2:30am. The hotel was decent though, and the next morning we discovered the hotel had a nice breakfast buffet and I was even able to take a quick cab ride to Tiannamen Square before the bus returned us to the airport. We finally landed at Dulles Saturday night after an uneventful 13 hour flight- a full 44 hours after my first flight had left Manila (from the time I left for the airport to the time I got home, it was nearly 50 hours of travel time).
