Stressful lead-up
It had been a stressful few weeks before my departure today. Due to recent reopening of borders after (?) the Covid-19 pandemic, flights to Singapore were fully booked for about 2 months. It would be risky for me to use airline staff standby tickets to get there and onwards to Malaysia.
There weren’t enough flights scheduled as there weren’t enough crew. They had to be retrained or rehired after being stood down or fired some two years ago.
Flights to Seoul on the other hand were half-full. I decided that would be the way for me to go but about two weeks ago, South Korea relaxed the pre-departure requirements, relaxing them from PCR to rapid antigen. Flights suddenly filled-up quite badly.
For me to make my travel plans work, I ended up having three sets of hotel bookings to cover the option of Singapore, Korea and a variety of dates. All that had to be carefully spreadsheeted with the free cancellation deadlines alongside.
I monitored the flight loads daily and in the last couple of days, it became apparent that Seoul would be my best bet with more than 30 spare seats.
Stressful departure
Kim took me to the airport around 0645 just before the rush hour started. Arriving at the airport some 2h40 before the 0955 departure, the queue was very long. It built up further and went beyond the end of the zig-zag because there was only one Economy Class counter and three for Business Class.
When other flights had closed, staff looking after the kiosks came over and we had a total of 8 counters later. It took me about 90 mins to get to my turn where my documents were carefully checked. The lady was so engrossed with the checks that she forgot to check my face to my passport.
Many people had documentation issues, eg. hadn’t applied for ETA or health QR code, or not printed them out. Staff were on hand to help print out items if passengers emailed them to a staff member in the back room.
I was given a standby boarding pass as the flight was apparently full enough to not give me a seat immediately. It was an hour till departure and the queue was still there. A 30 min delay was announced.
At the original departure time, my standby boarding pass was exchanged for a firm seat 3K in Business Class. I headed airside promptly. There were about 10 people behind me and as soon as they boarded, we closed up for departure.
Everything went smoothly on board except that the crew forgot to feed me lunch. They had taken meal choices while on the ground and didn’t notice me when I boarded. I asked when I saw them starting to serve dessert and was promptly offered a choice of mains. I chose the Korean-style beef which was quite tasty.
It felt a little strange on board this Air New Zealand flight that that all the cabin crew except one were Asian (Japanese, Korean and Chinese)!
I started to feel unwell during the second half of the flight. I had headache, neckache, was breathless when I moved around and felt like throwing up. It was exactly how I felt when I was in Tibet at high altitude (but had been fine on other occasions at similar of higher elevations). It didn’t make sense as the 787 Dreamliner has a better cabin pressure than most other planes.
A Panadol didn’t help that much but as we descended to half the altitude, I started to come right.
[Edit: I realised more than a week later that I had an internal infection and that may have been part of the problem.]