For a 1:45pm departure, I left my hotel at 11:20am, forgetting just how bad Bangkok traffic could get. Fortunately, the inbound flight from DXB looked like it would be late, so perhaps I could get away with it.
And get away with it I did, with the help of the Airport Skytrain from Makkasan station. The 15-minute ride took a bit over 18 minutes, enough to make a Swiss train engineer contemplate a new career but not so much as to put a dent in my travel plans.
I had originally booked this flight in Business and had been thinking about upgrading to First, after the surreal experience on my first leg. Indeed, the Emirates revenue managers must have read my mind as my e-mail inbox soon contained an offer to upgrade from J -> F for a seemingly low price. A quick Google search of “1200 HKD in USD” confirmed that it was a bit over $150. OMG, not too shabby! I had to double-check the carrier to make sure I wasn’t flying COdbaUA, because this looked like a TOD upgrade! I went through with the transaction, commenting “YOLO*” while my credit card processed.
*Urban Dictionary defines YOLO as: “Acronym for You Only Live Once. Mainly used to defend doing something ranging from mild to extreme stupidity.”
I made my way to the EK counters, empty in all 3 lines. Considering I arrived barely an hour before “shed-jeweled” departure, most passengers were already at the gate. The First counter agent commented, “looks like you’re the only passenger who is in F today.” Music to my ears, though I wouldn’t be sure of it until the doors were closed with just 1/14 in F. Especially since the Sequence Number on my BP was 0598. How many people can this plane fit?!
EK check-in counters
With a Premium Lane pass, I quickly passed through security and wandered around to find the EK lounge. Even with a printed map given out with the boarding pass, I made a few wrong turns.
I wonder if Tiger Airways got permission from EK to put their sign there ...
At first look, the BKK lounge is much better than the HKG lounge, though it helps that the number of pax here today were in the single digits. One thing BKK has that HKG doesn’t is a sit-down dining room. Though I’ll give HKG a hat-tip for its views over the concourse and the tarmac, while the BKK lounge looks inward to the Suvarnabhumi courtyard. Neither has a separate F lounge.
Massage chair of doom.
I waited out the delay with some lunch and some small talk with Atlas Air pilots on their way to fly a 747 freighter out of HKG. Now how cool does that sound?
A few minutes before boarding should have started, I began to exit the lounge … until the lounge dragon said it would be another 15 minutes until boarding would actually begin. But the expected value of a few more minutes in an A380 suite outweighed that of staying in the lounge for 15 minutes, so I went ahead anyway.
View of the concourse
I approached the gate waiting area and scanned my boarding pass to enter the small waiting area, with great daytime views of the A380.
A beluga whale with sunglasses
Ground-level view of A6-EDF
Ground workers put the size of the engines in perspective
Only after I "boarded" into the waiting area did the gate agent mention that it would be another 30 minutes until boarding would begin. While I would normally just stick around, the seating at the gate didn’t seem to take into account a fully loaded A380, so I requested to “de-board” of the flight. A quick show of my boarding pass and an explanation of my intentions to return to the lounge met no resistance.
A packed waiting area
But why am I explaining all this? As I sit now, at my desk in an air-conditioned room in the good ol’ U S of A, I’ve realized one thing about my country: we are incredibly liberal with air conditioning.
All this walking to-and-fro from the lounge in a world-class airport was like walking through the Mojave Desert. And more humid. This only made the prospect of another airborne shower oh so worth it.
I returned to the lounge and kept to bottles of water, the ones that spell “naivE” backward. I wanted to keep my palette pure for the eventual Dom.
After a 25-minute wait in the lounge, the dragon announced that boarding would begin in 5 minutes. I Usain Bolted out the lounge though slowed down when I realized the throng of economy class passengers already at the gate would use a separate jetway for the lower deck. My pathway to the suite would be mostly unhurdled.
Priority boarding for monks. Or maybe he has transcended even EK Gold.