By Lynn Tan

Chinese New Year is one of the most important occasions in the lunar calendar.

It's when faraway Chinese flock home to reunite with their families.

This increases the demand for all forms of road, rail and air travel, putting these transport systems to the test and inadvertently also testing the patience of travellers.

I recently flew a total of 23,000 miles on a return journey over eight flights and across four cities.

It was around Thanksgiving, the American version of the Chinese reunion dinner, and the various legs felt almost as challenging as The Amazing Race.

Before you even get airborne, the ordeal begins at the airport.

Even with internet check-in, you still need to join the queue and get your luggage tagged and sent on its way, hopefully to the same destination as you.

After that is done, you are herded like sheep and subjected to stringent security scrutiny in all your undignified, stripped-down glory. Then you sit at the boarding gate, and you wait.

Finally, the boarding call comes on, which signals the outbreak of the battle with front row passengers who refuse to obey the boarding sequence of rear-seated passengers first.

Before you eventually make it to your seat, you need to clear one last hurdle: passengers whose carry-on baggage can rival that of a circus' and who consequently have difficulty fitting them into the overhead compartments, and as a result, hold up the rest of the incoming passengers.

Your seat beckons like a prized trophy at the end of an arduous race through the aerobridge. But when you finally sink your dishevelled self into the cramped chair, you remind yourself that this is only the beginning.

The days of non-full flights are long over. You used to be able to stretch out across an entire row of seats, especially during red-eye flights.

Now, landing a vacant seat next to you is like striking lottery. Flying in cattle class is to be held captive in a confined space, with nowhere to run or hide.

So if you end up with chatty and boisterous travelling companions who insist on regaling the rest of the (unwilling) passengers with their sightseeing adventures and shopping bargains, or who saunter from seat to seat making small talk; good luck.

Then there are passengers behind you who insist on giving you a complimentary back massage with their knees or feet, or those with odour issues, regardless which part of their bodies the stench is emanating from.

And of course, there is the scariest of flying nightmares: the wailing infant. There are quite a number of solutions to this problem, from the extreme measure of sedating babies before they are allowed on the airliner, to providing some sort of specially designed soundproof pod that the cabin crew can just plonk over a particular seat containing mother and child and protect the rest of the passengers from the baby's strident cries.

I am glad to be back home and to drive rather than fly for the next couple of months.

And I am grateful to be spared the hassle of reunion dinner travel across borders, because I work and live where my family is.

So even if it's Chinese New Year, with all the loud banal music blaring from neighbourhood shops and the lion dance troupes thumping their drums and clanging their cymbals, I look forward to enjoying some peace and space on terra firma in my comfortable car.

Lynn has a frequent flyer card, but she is a far more frequent driver. Her aversion to intercontinental flight is "plane" to see, and she much prefers *to fly a fast one on the autobahn, ideally in an AMG.

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