How is this like Rick's in 'Casablanca'? I'm sitting in one of the 21st century equivalencies but it doesn't cut it. I'm at the Long Bar in one of the Cathay Lounges at Chep Lap Kok. There was nothing like this at Kai Tak but the atmosphere was ever so much more adventurous. Among other things, the simple fact of landing or successfully taking off was something of an event. In the five years I was based here in the 1990's, I recall one Lufthansa jet that didn't get off the end of the runway and essentially had to be dismantled. I also remember a China Airlines 747 that accelerated off the end of the runway and into the harbor rather than the air. Fortunately, there was an alert tugboat captain shoving stuff and he just pushed the plane into the shallows before it sank.
There was nothing like landing at Kai Tak. You aimed at a checkerboard on a hill, made a sharp turn and then dove down between apartment blocks, laundry hanging like flags and snatches of Cantonese soap operas momentarily visible through the windows as you roared by and down onto the tarmac, the engines roaring into reverse as soon as you hit the ground, screaming to a stop before the pavement ended and the water began.
I loved it! But I also made myself a promise that the day it became routine would be the day it was time for a change. I think it was 1995 or 1996, a year or so before the handover, when, one afternoon, I kept reading, absorbed, as we scooted in over Kowloon and realized, after we'd come to a halt just at the end of the runway on the edge of the Bay, that it was time to go! We moved to Manila not long after.
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