A business traveler's odyssey

As the sun dipped low in the sky Sunday and his plane began its descent, Eugene Nelson had a sinking feeling that something was wrong.

He'd been in the air for hours, much longer than his business flight from Hong Kong to Taiwan should have taken. Then the airliner flashed a map of his flight's path on a video screen, and it hit him.

Instead of descending toward the island off China's eastern coast, the next stop on the Intel engineer's itinerary would be Taiyuan, a remote industrial center deep within China.

It had a pronunciation and spelling similar to Taiwan but was very different.

"It felt like someone poured a bucket of hot water on me. I realized I was literally 200 miles south of the Mongolian border," Nelson said Wednesday, after a tearful reunion with his wife and three young children at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

"That's when dread just came over me," he said. "I don't know how else to explain it."

Helpful strangers

Nelson, 39, of Littlerock, Thurston County, works for Intel's facility in DuPont, Pierce County. He was in the middle of a swing through about a half-dozen Chinese cities, checking in with business partners, when he said an apparent booking mistake left him stranded in the Chinese interior.

His first night was spent trying to find out where he was and how to get to a hotel, Nelson said Wednesday at the airport, with his wife, Michelle Chewerda, and the couple's two sons and young daughter looking on.

His first attempts at finding lodgings revealed the problems of the language barrier: Nelson said he ended up at a brothel and had to "damn near fight my way out."

He returned to the small airport in the city of about 1.5 million but found it was about to close and officials would not let him sleep inside.

Nelson said he might never have found his way if not for a helpful young woman who spoke a bit of English and arranged for friends to loan him money and give him a ride to a hotel.

Myriad complications

After using the hotel's rare international dialing capacity to make some calls, Nelson said he spent the next few days attempting to collect a wire transfer of cash and arrange a flight out.

After hours of searching, Nelson said, he found a bank that would allow him to draw the cash that had been wired. Then he spent hours figuring out how to get his account information translated into Mandarin to access the money.

In between, Nelson said, he injured his legs and back leaping out of the way of a reckless car and endured spit that some Chinese hurled his way.

Back at home, Chewerda was dumping money into her husband's debit account and working with the travel company, which she said was less than helpful at times.

American Express officials contacted Wednesday by The Associated Press either declined immediate comment or did not return calls seeking comment.

After getting his hands on the money the company wired to him, Nelson said he finally had enough cash to begin arranging a flight.

He met up with his acquaintances again at the airport, repaying their loans and trying to express his thanks, he said.

He then hopped a flight, traveling through Beijing to Vancouver, B.C., and eventually to Sea-Tac, where he stood clutching his wife and children and mopping his tears.

How did it feel to be home?

"My God," Nelson said. "Better than I could possibly explain."