Category: Travel

I used Saturday to get over my jet lag.   The pictures were both taken from my hotel’s balcony (the hotel is A on the map).  The first view is toward Da Mei Sha beach, and that’s the Sheraton Hotel in the left of the second picture.   There is a marina hidden from view with a dozen or so yachts, in the second picture as well.  Yan Tian shipping port is only a few miles down the coast, so there is always a few container ships to be seen out at sea from here.

My transpacific trek is over and I’m in the hotel  in Dameisha.   Our route to Seoul took us north of the Kamchatka peninsula and north of Japan, and then the pilot had to approach Incheon airport from the west because of strong winds. The mascot picture is from the Korean newspaper, for the 2011 International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) championships that starts at the end of the month in Daegu, Korea.     It was 7 pm local time as we arrived into Seoul.

 

 

I’m at Seatac airport for my flight out to Hong Kong with a stop in Seoul.   The Asiana Airlines sign offers good guidance as far as what NOT to pack in one’s checked luggage.   Stuff in there get broken (and stolen!).  And airlines are still leery of lithium ion batteries ever since Dell and Apple Computer announced large recalls of laptop batteries in the summer of 2006, followed by Toshiba and Lenovo.   They are a fire hazard !

Local news of yesterday’s voting is that the Alaska Way Viaduct’s tunnel replacement is to proceed.  (I voted for it.  Yes, it will cost money but the viaduct replacement has been debated for 10 years! Move on!).

I was scheduled to travel to Hong Kong on Monday, but it has been pushed out to Wednesday.   I will work on a follow-on project to the one that we completed at Daya Bay.   I will make several trips to Hong Kong again, and stay in the area for about three weeks at a time.    This first itinerary to Hong Kong is one I have done a few times before : on Asiana Airlines with a stop at Incheon airport in Seoul.    Looking at it on a globe, one can see that Seattle, Seoul and Hong Kong lie almost in a ‘straight line’ (a straight line in terms of great circle navigation on the surface of the earth).

I’m home!  The long journey from Cape Town to Seattle had me cross three continents and one ocean.   But before too much sympathy is heaped on me : I got upgraded to first class from Frankfurt to Chicago.   Life is a charm in first class at 38,000 ft, complete with caviar served with crumbed cheese, onion and a lime and German Riesling to wash it down with. 

The tarmac picture is of O’Hare airport with the Airport Hilton behind the old control tower, and the new control tower on the right.   And finally a picture of somewhere over south Washington State.  I think that’s Mt Adams on the horizon.

This is Wednesday morning and I am in the lounge at Frankfurt airport.    The pictures show the highlights of my day, all done with the U-bahn.   I stayed at the Marriott Courtyard in Nordwestzentrum (pink line at top of map).    The center of Frankfurt is at Hauptwache station (second stop to the right from the main station Haupt Bahnhof).    The Hauptwache is one of the most famous plazas in the city.   That’s where I found the church (I forgot its name!).  Check out the red velotaxi in front of it – a pedal bike with a seat for a passenger to be pedaled somewhere close by.    The spectacular glass and steel building with curved surfaces inside and out is there as well, next to the Kaufhof (department store).    Look for me in the red shirt !  on the overhead picture as well as taking a picture of the curry wurst with thick pommes* smiley face.  *Very popular/ most popular fast food snack in Germany.     Then I went to check out the main station.   Atlas on the roof is carrying the world on his shoulders.    The final few pictures are all from around Römerberg the plaza with the Rathaus (city hall) .. there is some very beautiful detail on some of the doors and walls and windows to be seen.

We arrived on time at 5.20 am in Frankfurt.   I sat on the upper deck of the ‘big bird’ Airbus A-380 that brought us here.   These pictures are wall panels at the baggage claim at Terminal A.    The 1970 aircraft tug with 600 hp will NOT do and instead a 1,400 hp tug pushes back the A-380.  (The Germans did not translate PS in the pictures.  It stands for Pferdestärke!  Horse power!)    And fuel is now pumped into the belly (and wings?) of the plane at 7,000 liters/ min compared to a typical 300 liters per minute.

I’m catching a few winks at a hotel and then I will go see the city before I ship out to the USA and Seattle in the morning.

 

 

 

Marlien and I went to the Victoria &Alfred Waterfront today.   It was not cold, but a little blustery as the pennants and the South African flag in the picture shows.   That is Table Mountain in the backgroud, of course : Cape Town’s signature landmark.   By the time we left an hour later, a thick blanket of cloud was rolling over the mountain.

I picked up a friend at Cape Town International Airport today, which is where I found this life-size bronze elephant.  The beast was created under the direction of Jean Doyle and the Doyle Art Foundry, with the help of a fellow sculptor.   The project took a full 2 years to complete.      Donations from the public can be put in the tree stump collections box for the Out of Africa Children’s fund.    The elephant is not a permanent fixture :  it will be auctioned at the end of the year and the funds raised will also go to charity.

That’s me, hitting a few balls against the wall on the tennis court at my brother’s house.    Tessa the Jack Russell terrier is trying to nab the ball.     The oak trees lining Victoria Avenue at the University of Stellenbosch campus (it’s my alma mater) have no leaves this time of year.    And the sidewalks will fill up with students on Monday when they return for class after their winter break.

We have beautiful calm and mild weather here in Stellenbosch.    This oak tree found itself in the wrong spot when the road was built a long time ago, but was left in place (kudos to the road builders).     Just be sure to pass it on the left !   We drive on the left side of the road, the same way the British do.

 

 

Cape Town International Airport was fogged in as we approached it at 9 am local time, but we landed nonetheless.   The pilot announced afterwards that the smooth landing was thanks to Boeing’s automatic landing system on the aircraft.       Of course, the pilot has to be certified and the airport’s ground systems have to support the whole process as well !  I think we did a Cat II  landing since the visibility was about 300m (1,500 ft).  The sequence of cockpit shots are from a video clip I found on-line.

Here is a rundown of the Instrument Landing System (ILS) Categories  :
Cat I :  200 feet Decision Height* (DH);  2,400 feet (or 1,800 ft) Runway Visual Range (RVR)
*The height at which point a decision must be made to either continue the approach or to execute a missed approach (abort the landing).
Cat II Restricted :  150 feet DH;  1,600 feet Runway Visual Range (RVR)
Cat II :  100 feet DH;  1,200 feet RVR
Cat III A :   No DH (alert height generally 50 feet);  700 feet RVR
Cat III B :  No DH (alert height generally 35 feet);   600 feet RVR
Cat III C :  No DH,  zero visibility – a “blind” landing.    This one is almost never done, since the pilot will not be able to find the gate after landing !

The first picture is of Lagos coming in from Frankfurt (6 hr flight).    In the next one we’re at the arrival gate.   Murtala Muhammed is a former military head of state that the airport is named after.     So .. how did it go in Lagos airport?  Well,  was quite an adventure!    The passport check point is as basic as it gets : 2 uniformed officials behind a bare counter top inspecting our passports and the blue arrival cards that we filled out.    NO passport scanner, NO camera, NO computer.   Not even a pad and a rubber stamp !   And where’s my visa?  the official asked.   My heart jumped – ‘Uh – I’m just connecting, on my way to South Africa’, I replied.    Ok, said the customs official, we will hold your passport.   Go and collect your luggage and come back here.      The two baggage claims are not marked, there is no air conditioning and it is crowded.   But lo and behold, my luggage did show up, and now I clamber back up the stairs man-handling my bags.    The person that took my passport is no longer at the desk – turned out it got handed over to a person in another room.    The guy with our passports tells 4 of us to follow him.    We go outside onto the tar road in front of the terminal, dodging the taxi drivers soliciting rides, then back into the terminal, up another flight of stairs.    By now I’m sweating the way I do after eating mildly spiced Mexican or Thai food (a lot!) .    Inside there is another crowd of people clamoring at the South African Airways check-in counter.  No problem : our escort yells at the officials in charge of the check-in line,  and gets us right in front.     Finally he hands our passports back to us and shows is to the security check point for the boarding gates.

So the ‘passport separation anxiety’ we felt was not warranted – the official was very helpful.   We would have been totally at a loss as to where to go next, after going through the passport check.   Should we have tipped him?  I don’t know – I didn’t.   I didn’t have any local currency anyway.   But if the airport had been modeled on Schiphol airport from what I read on-line, there was none of that efficiency visible.    The airport suffers from badly designed passenger traffic flow; it needs to install electronic systems, and it needs some serious sign posting to be installed as well.

The cool African mask is from inside the lounge at the airport.

Another 6 hrs got us in at 6.00 am at Johannesburg airport.   I had to hustle to make my 7.00 am connection to Cape Town (another long passport control line + re-check bagagge + run to the gate).    But hey, I made it, and so did my baggage : 3 international connections and 36 hrs of travel time!

I’m at Frankfurt airport.  They had us step off the plane onto a bus that took us to the terminal.   The Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper reported the upset of the German women’s soccer team against Japan in the Women’s World Cup .. quite a feat by the Japanese given that the German women’s team won the last two tournaments.

There is also an interview with writer Gary Shteyngart, about his new novel ‘Super Sad True Love Story ‘ – a darkly comic science-fiction story about the decline of the United States.    From the interview : The problem is that Obama can not act. He is very weak. He can do nothing against the opposition. The Republicans paralyze him, they are a very aggressive party.

 

Feeling frantic and flying on Korean Air?  Check into the Morning Calm section (it’s between Economy and Business, maybe it offers more legroom;  I’m not sure).     And the Seattle Times front page today reports that arriving passengers frequently face a bottleneck at the international arrivals point.    I have to say I have not experienced long waiting times the few times when I came in directly from Seoul, but I guess I have been lucky not to arrive at the same time as other international flights.

I am packing my bags for my trip to Cape Town, South Africa.   The itinerary breaks down as follows : 10 hrs on Lufthanza to Frankfurt, 6 hrs (Lufthanza) to Lagos, 6 hrs (South African Airways) to Johannesburg, 2 hrs (South African Airways) to Cape Town.   There were no seats left on the direct flight from Frankfurt to Cape Town and so the stop in Lagos, Nigeria (picture from the web) which is a first for me, is a little intimidating.   Even though the international terminal is modeled after Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, there were serious security problems at the airport until 2001.    For example, travelers arriving being harassed inside and outside the airport terminal by criminals, immigration officers requiring bribes before stamping passports and customs agents demanding payment for nonexistent fees.

I will travel to South Africa this Monday to visit my family.  I will travel on ‘Continental Airlines’ : really a combination of Lufthanza and South African Airways codeshare flights.   I read the report about the efforts to complete the merger of Continental Airlines and United Airlines in a recent issue of Bloomberg Businessweek with interest (picture from this week’s issue).   In a way it’s the work that I do on some of my projects : phase some systems out and implement new ones in their place.    To create the world’s largest airline, the two carriers have to merge about 1,400 separate systems, programs and protocols.    In the end United Continental will provide service to 373 airports in 63 countries.  Its frequent flyer program will have more members than France has citizens (62 million).

My 1996 Toyota Camry finally needed an oil change and I took it to the Toyota dealership on Monday.   It has 109,500 miles on the clock.   The first picture below is from 1999, somewhere in Denver.  The next one is from 2003, a little trip I made down to Oregon.    But back to the oil change :  I authorized several little repairs as well – replace brake pads, brake fluid, accessory drive belt.    All in, the bill was well over $500.     That’s the price one pays for convenience and independence from public transport, right?   I really should replace the car at some point, but  1.  where I live, I am surrounded by public transport options,  2. I travel a lot for work, and 3.  the choice of what model and type of car to pick has gotten even more difficult with the new electric car technologies coming into play.  So I guess I will wait a little longer and see what happens.

The Seattle Street Car runs by the Toyota dealership between Seattle downtown and the South Lake Union area and of course I had to take a picture of it.

I ran down to King County International Airport* today for an interview for my Global Entry access.   The Global Entry program provides expedited clearance for pre-approved, low-risk travelers upon arrival at twenty-some designated airports in the USA.   (For frequent USA-Canada travelers there is a separate program called Nexus). There is no minimum number of trips needed to apply for the program but it does cost $100 and is good for 5 years before one has to renew.   But now I can swipe my passport at a kiosk, put my grubby four right hand fingers on the fingerprint reader and then I should be good to go.   I think the kiosk snaps a face picture as well.

*It is actually the official name of what we in Seattle know as Boeing Field, a two run-way airport to the immediate south of the city used mostly for general aviation and for cargo.   I love the front entrance.   I believe it dates from 1928 when the airport opened.    The picture of Tsu Wong is from the waiting room.  He was a 1916 graduate from MIT and was Boeing’s first engineer !

I made it in at Seattle airport at 1.30pm.  The United Airlines tail is from San Francisco International airport, same as the one we were in.    Coming in from there to Seattle, we made a turn over downtown and headed south again.   The black structure in the middle of the picture is Columbia Tower, the city’s tallest building.   Everything in the foreground is ‘West Seattle’, connected to the city with the West Seattle bridge.