With the amount of stuff I was carrying (for ten days) the first place I went after clearing security was The Pier J. We've waited almost 20 years for storage lockers to finally show up at CX lounges
I then satisfied my 2-month craving for Cathay Delight and settled at a corner of the very quiet Pier J lounge to catch up emails and texts. It's really one hell of a lounge and I'm sure it'll be giving the QF lounge tough competition.
Then I headed over to Pier F for a light dinner (which ended up being 3 courses...that's me) before showering and heading over to the nearby gate for boarding. As I said, when you have all of these, a 3 hour layover feels painfully too short
The salmon confit was nice and balanced in terms of its rawness. The seafood soup with rice had too much rice and too little seafood. The chilled mango sago soup...well...nice try but again meh.
Time ran out quickly and I knew I would be back in 2 days so there's not much to share for this layover
As I posted in the CX forum there were some upgrade shenanigans (or so I believed) but generally the flight was not full. Was told that quite a couple didn't make it from PVG/PEK.
Was borderline going to sweat but I arrived at gate 41 only to see this:
Tonight's chariot B-KQE. Yay for a new addition to my rollcall but the problem of a JNB run is you get a double count of the same frame...
Anyway, sooner or later boarding was called in a fairly organized manner and I was in my 11A in no time. I was greeted warmly by the ISM Rita who glanced at my mobile BP and said 'you do know your way sir
' - again I knew she wouldn't be a bad one!
The JNB flight is operated by a 3-class 77W (77G in Cathay speak) which is different from the 4-class 77H that does most American routes. 11A on the 77G is not as fabulous as the 77H but still offers a larger footwell and good privacy as well as being first off the plane.
The 77G is undercrewed by nature so some faces that ended up being unfamiliar helped with the boarding process including PDBs, of which I chose Oriental breeze which was a bad choice having brushed my teeth earlier... Due to the light load again we pushed back on time and rolled away before midnight for a 2340 departure, not bad at all for HKG.
As soon as the belt light got off kits and Evian were given out using trays swiftly.
ISM Rita came by as I was about to start bingewatching the TV drama again - she informed me of winning the lottery, I was the only emerald onboard tonight and there were no CX DMs!!!! JNB is quite a DM-heavy route so I was surprised. Then SP Tina from Thailand came by and gave a special welcome too, while handing out the menus. OMG the other big oneworld legacies please please learn a bit.
If you have seen me on the CX forum, I am one of the biggest bashers of the 'dips and berries' supper service that CX has been serving since 2014 with those plastic packaged grissini dips. At the same time I guess it's a love-hate relationship - one-tray services are indeed great for departures at such hour, and it would show here.
A great thing about the JNB flight is the ZA red they have, Mont du Toit. It's probably the only drinkable red/white they serve in J across the network. So I carried it through from appetizer to cheese, and it also functioned well as a sleep aid afterwards. The main course of steak with bernaise sauce was a bit too tender and lacking in flavor, but given HKG catering, anything that I don't end up throwing up I know I should be 'grateful'. I was expecting the light meal option of Lobster salad from Tosca @ RCHK, but I guess these marketing gimmicks were too expensive to last long. Unfortunately Tina knew nothing about it.
The merits of the supper service came through when the lights went out at around ten minutes past 1am. Now I've had an extravagant near-full meal in AA J departing at midnight but that continued until like 3am. So I can understand why there is popularity for the supper option. I wrapped up quickly after the cheese course and pralines and once again set up my bed like the worst brat ever thanks to the accommodation of the ISM:
Slouching in my bed I watched one more episode of the TV show before I saw a stunning sight out of the window: can you recognize this sight?
I don't remember what happened next because the next moment I realized the remote control was showing 2 hours out of JNB. The strategy of sleeping less on my incoming flight worked well after all. Within a few moments the mood lighting mimicking sunrise(?) was set in place and the crew began a drinks run of orange juice and passion fruit/strawberry smoothies for the breakfast service. We had already made landfall over Africa.
Breakfast, while filling, is again not an extravagant affair on CX. But at least it fed me reasonably well. Knowing how disastrous the egg option can be ex-HKG, I went for the dim sum which was again borderline tasteless but still okay. The
lor mai gai (chicken glutinous rice) as you can see did not have enough content in it.
ISM Rita came back to check with me and said she noticed that I slept well. I sure did
. The sun was hovering over the horizon/Indian Ocean as we gradually descended into JNB. We touched down and taxied to the gate for a while, arriving at the new pier of the terminal around 15 minutes ahead of schedule. As we waited for the jetbridge to connect, I chatted with some of the crew about their plans in JNB and all that and wished them a safe and happy trip/rest.
Every time I do the JNB run I freak out a bit seeing how overwater the flight path is. But nevertheless I tend to sleep quite well on the 749 so once again it was a solid flight with CX ^
