Yes, This Is Real Life Part 7: Dealing With Dragons

 

View from the DOH-CMB flight

It's the turn-around point!  But first, the story so far:

Yes, This Is Real Life - Preview

Yes, This Is Real Life Part 1 - Location, Location, Location

Yes, This Is Real Life Part 2 - Brits in Beantown

Yes, This Is Real Life Part 3 - Shades On, Wheels Up

Yes, This Is Real Life Part 4 - Welcome To Ghostport

Yes, This Is Real Life Part 5 - When You Layover During Ramadan...

Yes, This Is Real Life Part 6 - Birds In Doha

Welcome to Columbo, for the second time.  Last time I passed through here, I dealt with the trials of getting onward tickets from Sri Lankan for Qatar, and the entirely underwhelming absorptive properties of the towels in the shower at the UL (Sri Lankan airways) lounge.

This time, I had vague plans of actually leaving the airport.  There were a few attractions nearby, and while the CMB airport falls into the 'it's fine' category, it's not an epic lounge destination like HKG.  However, as I went on about previously, mileage runs are trips where you react in the moment to what simply sounds the best.  In this case, what sounded the best....was a nap.  So, we took a nap.

CMB Airport

 As it so happens, CMB is a great place for this because there's a small transit hotel right in the airport that doesn't require clearing immigration to get to.  This was even better, because another large factor in our staying airside was that they wanted someplace around $40 a person for a visa on arrival.  While that's not really all that much in context, it starts to feel obnoxious when there's two of you, and you only really have about 5 hours on the ground to start with.

The transit hotel hallway.  Nothing fancy, but perfect for a nap.

The day rate at the hotel was less than the visa price (bless cheap SE Asia), so we split a room for a shower and a solid couple hours of downtime.  To get there, head toward the exit, past the transit desk and shrine in the center of the terminals, and follow signs to the Hotel.  The rooms aren't anything fancy, but they're clean (enough) and quiet.  The timing couldn't be better for trying to stay away from heavy jetlag, since for 'us' it was still the middle of the night. 



This way...

Feeling better, we did of course go for a little lounge time before our outbound flights.  Here's where some shenanigans started up again.  Now, here's an (exceedingly) rare moment where I'll have to admit I was in the wrong.  I know it's impossible to believe, but stick with me.

The Oneworld rules for lounge access state that a OW Emerald, such as myself, gets 1st class lounge access "when the next onward flight is on a Oneworld owned and operated flight."  The same rule applies to guests.  They don't have to be on your same Oneworld flight, just a Oneworld flight.

There are actually a couple lounges up by the transit hotel, including the Emirates and a small Sri Lankan.  The bigger, better, Sri Lankan lounge is in the main terminal though.

Unfortunately this time, my travel companion and I were preparing to go separate ways after flying together up to this point.  I was headed back to Doha on Qatar, and he was flying back to the US by way of Dubai on an Emirates award ticket.  What this resulted in was us each having good lounge access, just to different lounges, and neither of us could rightly guest the other in.  This is not to say we didn't try at both places.... but it didn't work out.  I was hoping that given that the UL lounge was empty, and he did have his Oneworld card on him, we might slide by.  However, the lounge dragons, after some chatter amongst themselves, thought otherwise. 

As I said, I knew I was in the wrong here going in, so there was no point in protesting.  We said our goodbyes, and each spent a few minutes in our respective lounges before going to our gates. 

Bar at the Sri Lankan lounge.  I like the "airplane" motif.

My time at the lounge was, I'll admit, true to form for my jetlagged-delirious self at this point.  I was nearly the only one there, and there were few staff of any kind.  In a matter of about 30 minutes I managed to spill cylon tea on myself, raid the bar fridge and open my own bottle of champagne, and on account of not reading Tamil well, blow right past the sign that said the buffet was temporarily closed while they changed from lunch to dinner dishes, and help myself to the food, distributing my own serving utensils as I went.  Not super proud, but no regrets either.  Really, they should have let my buddy in as I clearly needed adult supervision.

Yeah.... I went there.

 

I ate whatever this was, even though they weren't serving yet.

After all of that, I said goodbye to Colombo and got back on my next Qatar flight. As was becoming the theme of this amazing weekend, I was once again nearly alone on my flight.  The plane was a 777-200, which Qatar has business class laid out in a 2-2-2 configuration.  On this one I had the entire row of 6 seats behind the bulkhead to MYSELF.  Basically a whole mini business class cabin.  Unreal.

Miiiiiine, all mine...

So I flew out alone, right back to another sleepless night in Doha....

~CruisingAltitude

Up next- A Place Most Exceedingly Rare: My triumphant return to Doha (again), thoughts you didn't ask for about IFE, and a primer on Qatar transit visas.