Look East Look West: Flight to Penang Malaysia

Cathay Pacific Welcome

We started our trip to Penang Malaysia and Cambodia in the Cathay Pacific Lounge in Terminal A at SFO. Beautiful lounge with very inviting seating. San Francisco Airport is one of the nicer airports in the United States, at least for some of the terminals. While Terminal 2 is probably my favorite, International Terminals A & G are quite nice as well.

Dan-Dan Noodles

At the CX lounge entrance we were welcomed by a friendly associate in a Cathay Pacific uniform. She reprinted our boarding passes on Cathay Pacific card stock, along with invitations to Cathay Pacific’s arrivals lounge in Hong Kong. She also asked if we were familiar with the lounge’s recent expansion, so proceeded to give us a rundown of the features of the lounge.

CX879 Seat 17A

After getting settled, I went the famous Noodle Bar where I ordered my Fav Dan-Dan Noodles that has a wonderful peanut sauce. You could order from three types of noodles, Dan-Dan, Wonton and Vegetarian. When you place an order you are given a buzzer. When your noodles were finished they buzz you for pick-up.

In Flight

Cathay has stopped flying 747s so we were excited to be on a 777 Business Class for flight CX 879. At around 10:45 boarding began and we were scheduled to depart from gate A3, which was just a three minute walk from the lounge.

Dinner at 37,000 ft

When we got to Terminal A, the boarding gates are on the lower level, so we took the escalator down a level where the gate area was pretty civilized for Business Class. We boarded using the priority lane, settled into our seats, and got ready for the15 hour flight to Hong Kong.

Air Show

Tropical Clouds

Hong Kong was just a plane change and we only had an hour to get through the Transit Lane and get to the gate for our flight to Kuala Lumpur International departing at 20:20. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to visit the CX arrivals lounge at HKG. Only had an hour but, it all worked out. We got to gate 27 from gate 3 and passed through Transit no problem and we were soon in the air heading to Malaysia. We departed SFO at 11:45 and arrived HKG at 19:00.