Travellers' Checks | Indian budget airline SpiceJet to start daily Hong Kong-Mumbai flights
Months after Jet Airways suspended operations, the low-cost carrier SpiceJet has announced plans to fly the popular route
Indian low-cost airline SpiceJet will begin daily non-stop flights between Hong Kong and Mumbai on July 31, bringing some much needed competition back to a route dropped by the country’s Jet Airways in April. SpiceJet, which launched a Hong Kong-Delhi service last November, will be operating a two-class, 168-seat Boeing 737-800, at least until its grounded Boeing 737 MAX 8 fleet, along with those of many other airlines, is allowed back in the air.
Boeing reportedly told SpiceJet last April that this would be happening this month, but it now looks like the worldwide grounding of the 737 MAX could drag on for longer. SpiceJet is offering convenient flight times, with a 12.15pm departure from Hong Kong, arriving in Mumbai at 3.20pm. Return flights depart at 1.05am, for a 9.40am arrival in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong’s Central GPO to offer city’s sole Poste Restante facility
More than one 19th-century visitor to Hong Kong noted the Biblical quote above the entrance of the General Post Office (GPO) on the corner of Queen’s Road and Pedder Street. “A pathetic proof of the chronic home-sickness which seems to possess European residents in the East, and which we ourselves appreciate,” wrote one Mrs Joseph Cook on her round-the-world tour in 1883, “is the text engraven on the stone arch of the post-office doorway: ‘As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country.’”
More than a decade earlier, American journalist Edward Dorr Griffin Prime noticed the same words. “Nothing,” he wrote in Around the World: Sketches of Travel Through Many Lands and Over Many Seas in 1870 (1872), “could be more appropriate in this distant part of the world.” The signage was saved when the GPO was moved to Des Voeux Road in 1911, and given what The Hongkong Telegraph described the following year as “a heavy hard-wood frame-work of ornamental design”. When that spectacular building was demolished in 1976 to make way for World-Wide House, it was again saved and moved to the new GPO building in Connaught Place, Central.
Until the early 1990s, travellers could collect their “good news from a far country” at the Poste Restante room that occupied a large ground-floor space at the building’s western corner. Other post offices also offered a Poste Restante service, but this was the largest and most frequented, especially by backpackers and cruise-ship passengers. It was moved to a counter on the first floor, then to the out-of-the-way Counter 29, which it now shares with the Insured Mail desk. In December 2017, “in light of the changes in service demand”, Poste Restante services were restricted to the Central GPO, and three other post offices, in Tsim Sha Tsui, Sha Tin and Tsuen Wan. From this month, in a sad reflection of the moribund state of letter writing, only the Central GPO will offer a Post Restante facility.