Hello Tonya,
Curious why you find my trip optimistic. Is it because it will be the wet season in Bali or you don't trust China Air to get me there or it just looks like a happy trip?
10
skylyn
12
istanbull
CAAC stands for China Airlines Always Crashes. Not true - but the aircrew do play a lot of mahjong in the cockpit when they should be watching the altimeter.
13
oonks
I can absolutely recommend the Hindu Veg. My best ever plane food was on the flight from Singapore to Chennai. They know how to do interesting veg food unlike qantas and some other western airlines that don't have a clue.
14
nutraxfornerves
China Airlines is based in Taiwan. CAAC, based in the PRC, split into Air China and some internal airlines. Some of my most, um, entertaining flights were on CAAC in the early 1980s. Food related: as we boarded the flight from Turfan to Gansu, each passenger was handed a box lunch and a quart of beer.
China Airlines is likely to have edible food and pilots who have had some flight training.
15
cocodrilo
Those 80s flights (on mainland China carriers) used to offer lunches which contained green, gelatinous items. I wonder if that's still the case..
16
istanbull
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<hr>Those 80s flights (on mainland China carriers) used to offer lunches which contained green, gelatinous items.<hr></blockquote>
Coco I'm heaving at the thought. What's the mandarin for boogers?
17
nutraxfornerves
On one internal flight, they passed out empty compartmentalized trays, then came down the aisle with a cart full of mystery gunk in mystery sauce and slopped it onto the trays. They would only have silverwarre, no chopsticks, which made it tough for the Chinese on board. The box lunches, as I recall, had sandwiches of canned mystery meat on stale white bread and a hard boiled egg. Looked like they food had been sitting out at room temperature all night. I forgot to mention that no openers were provided for the beer bottles. Us foreigners with our Swiss army knives were quite popular.
Many of the planes were old Russian jobs. Given that China & Russia had stopped speaking to each other about 20 years previously, the planes weren't exactly new. Maintenance was not a strong point. On one flight, we tore up air sick bags to plug the holes in the ceiling that were dripping condensation after the plane was pressurized. That flight landed at night, one of the roughest landings I ever had--bang, bang, bump, bump. Turned out the airport had a power outage & the pilot landed blind, no lights or radio communication, guided by some guy with a feeble flashlight.
But they always handed out souvenirs on the flights. Huge bags of candy. Key chains with the CAAC logo. Kiddie toys. I still have the silk handkerchiefs, fancy fans, and woven bamboo plate with the hand painted panda.
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