I have also had the distinct pleasure of travelling through CDG as well. I was travelling from
Pearson in Toronto to Murtala Mohammed Airport in
Lagos (
Nigeria) via
Air France.
Before boarding my plane in Toronto, I was given a small folder labeled "Transfer at Paris-Charles de Gaulle", which was supposed to simplify my transfer to the Lagos flight at CDG.
My flight arrived at Hall 2B (i think) at CDG, somehow after wandering for 10 minutes, I managed to find the transfers desk, and my transfer agent informed me in mixed french and english that I was to board the transfer shuttle waiting just outside the door and get off at hall 2C, which meant that i had to travel all the way around the outside of the 3-loop figure eight, getting off at 2C, the next stop on the transfer shuttle would have been...you guessed it...Hall 2B. I waited for an hour at the assigned gate, and began to get a little worried as the boarding time approached, and no plane was waiting at the end of the boarding ramp. 5 minutes before the flight is to board, a funny looking bus drives up and lifts itself up to the boarding ramp on a funny-looking scissor-like jack. Apparently, we are to board the bus, and the bus drives out to the plane, waiting on the airfield somewhere. When we arrive at the plane, the bus does its acrobatic act again and lifts itself up to the entrance hatch.
The way back was much more fun. The plane from Lagos stopped somewhere out on the airfield, but this time we didn't get one of the funky lifting buses, instead we had to climb down boarding stairs in the cold december air (we had just come from a tropical climate, and a few people were wearing shorts and t-shirts), and get on a Renault shuttle bus to the terminal. The bus stopped at a nondescript unlabeled door outside 2F. Inside the door was a narrow hallway that curved around, went up an escalator, curved around again, and came to a set of closed locked doors. As the shuttle buses unloaded people, they walked into the door, down the narrow hallway, ascended the escalator, came to the locked door, and stopped. People below, at the bottom of the escalator, not aware that traffic was stopped up ahead, boarded the escalator like livestock, cramming more and more people into the tiny hallway at the top of the stairs. Finally, no more people were able to fit, and people began to fall down the escalator until someone with a brain pushed the emergency stop button.