As I write this, yesterday morning, I arrived at the Taipei International Airport, which reminded me in many ways of LAX, an airport I notoriously despise and one which I nonetheless find myself changing planes not infrequently because it is often cost-effective to change planes there for whatever reason (as was the case on this trip, as it happens). As I had barely over two hours between when I landed and when I was to board my next flight, I would have appreciated a compact airport that would have allowed for easy transportation between the gates, but that is not at all what I got, and as it happened, I had just enough time to accomplish my purposes as it was, even without stopping anywhere to eat and only stopping to sit and charge my phone during the course of a long trudge around an airport that was way larger than it needed to be.

How large does an airport need to be? I suppose the obvious answer would be large enough to suit its purposes, and yet as large as Taiwan’s airport is, it is not in fact quite large enough to suit its purposes? Ask me how I know, I dare you. There are four named blocks of gates (which in most airports would be thought of as separate terminals) and two numbered terminals where people enter the airport and move through security. This is itself a reasonably good feature, in that once you get through one of the terminals (presumably domestic and international, one would suspect), you can get to any other gate, and once you land in the airport you can get anywhere else in the airport without having to go through security again, which is very convenient it must be admitted). The issue at hand is that while these four named terminals A-D are sprawling and long, they only have a total of ten gates apiece, along with a single gate labeled differently that, as I found out, drops down to an area where there are still more terminals (the gate my flight to Phnom Penh was on, gate B1R, was itself a crowded terminal with eight gates and a large number of disorganized travelers trying like me to get on flights).

I arrived in something like gate D6, roughly halfway down the D gate, and walked toward the end of the D gate looking for gate 602, which seemed like a very strange gate number for an airport that I could see had gates with letters. I figured this would be an issue, which is an early sign of correct intuition, it must be admitted, but when I went to look on the screens for the gate number, the screens showed that my flight was taking off from gate B1R. This was still an odd format but at least it had a letter, so I resolved to hike to the gate to see my terminal. As one might imagine, this proved to be quite a hike. My initial hike to the screens had been, perhaps somewhat predictably, in the wrong direction, and I only saw terminal A in the direction I had been going to look at the screens, and so to get to terminals B and C it was necessary for me to retrace my steps in the opposite direction. When I did so I found that I had a very long hike through shopping and next to a very long set of security gates to get to the other side of the airport where the gates for terminals B and C were located. By that point my legs were already getting sore, and it said that the walk to terminal B would be another fourteen minutes or so after one got through terminal C, so I figured it was a good time to rest my poor legs and charge up my cellphone, which was running very low, to chat with friends and family and let them know I was safe, so I did so.

By the time my phone had been charged up to 80% or so it was about half an hour before it was time for me to board my flight so I figured it was time to get a move on, and so I did. It involved a long hike through first the C terminals, the space between the C and B terminals, and then through the B terminal, which was cartoonishly oversized for having only ten gates, it must be admitted. Some of that space that I walked through was used for reasonable purposes, like restaurants and ships, but a large part of it was simply a hall where I looked upon windows that pointed to the other side of the airport and the rails of what looked like a pretty useless Skytrain that no one was using and that it did not appear obvious that one could board easily. Once I got to the end of the B terminal, after a long hike, I saw stairs and an escalator going down a couple of floors and then when I got there it was another large terminal where I hiked around and eventually found that my gate was gate 8, the furthest of these gates. I got in the line, which was a chaotic process with a lot of people cutting in and the airline people not really doing anything to organize the mass of people until it was time to go through, which I did (somehow) in boarding group 1 after all the various elite members and so on went. The reward for this was another long hike, to the furthest bus bay, where we got on a bus to drive out to a far part of the tarmac to spot #602, apparently, where the plane actually was, and when we got on the plane it ended up being mostly empty anyway. At least that meant I had some room to stretch and nap for my flight to Phnom Penh, so that was a positive at least.