Paradise postponed

On Saturday morning, I slept past my alarm. I hurried to SFO on BART, only to arrive about 20 minutes before my flight, to Honolulu, was scheduled to depart. It was too late to get on the flight, but after an hour of negotiating with the Hawaiian Airlines and ATA staff, I was put on a later flight to Honolulu, scheduled to depart at 10:30--two hours later than the flight I had missed, but still plenty of time to make my connection to Papeete.

Takeoff, however, was delayed by three hours, so we landed in Honolulu at 5--15 minutes before the Papeete flight was scheduled to take off. I ran off the plane and to my gate, where the next plane was waiting. They told me I had 30 seconds to decide whether I wanted to get on the plane. Rather foolishly, I said yes (because all my collecting equipment was in my checked bag, and that would never make it onto the next flight), and as soon as I said this, someone standing close to the jetway shook his head and said it was too late to get on the flight, because boarding had just finished. The problem was that there is only one flight a week from Honolulu to Papeete, and I had just missed it.

So I spent the next few hours in airport purgatory in Honolulu, lugging all my baggage around between various airline counters. Exhaustion overcame my sense of frustration, which was convenient. Hawaiian Airlines was extremely helpful, and tried to help me find a way onto a United flight to LA and then an Air Tahiti Nui flight to Papeete, but the information hotline for Air Tahiti Nui was closed since it was after 5 pm. So I decided to fly back to San Francisco the next day. ATA put me up in the Honolulu Airport Hotel for free and gave me a meal voucher, and told me to call their customer services hotline to get my return ticket on Hawaiian converted. ATA has a customer service line open 24 hours a day, staffed in India, which after 40 minutes and being put on hold four times, was unable to convert my ticket. I also spent a while trying to make an international call to French Polynesia to tell the person scheduled to pick me up at the airport that I wouldn't be there.

So I went to the airport early on Sunday, got my ticket converted to an ATA one at 3:35 pm, and spent the rest of the day at the airport. For an airport with so many Japanese tourists, there really isn't any good Japanese food available. It wasn't a big enough airport to keep me occupied all day, so I spent most of the day watching it rain outside and reading The World According to Garp while fighting off a headache (see photo above).

Finally, my flight boarded and took off (on time! arrgghhh!) and I got back in to San Francisco at 10 pm. Luggage was delayed 40 minutes, I got on the last BART, and it was delayed 20 minutes. I got back to my apartment at 1:15 am.

This is awfully frustrating (and becomes more and more so the more time passes since I got back here), but I'll have the chance to go back in June, and the Honolulu-Papeete part of my ticket can be transferred to a later flight. Next time I'm taking a taxi to the airport, too.