Into China

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After a full day of HK and two nights, we decided it was time to move on and cross into China. We took a bus from Kowloon to the city of Guangzhou, in Guangdong province (previously known as Canton). We had to leave the coach at the boarder to go through immigration control and cross into the PRC... unfortunately everyone else on the bus seemed to be either Chinese or hong kong-ese and knew the drill. By the time we'd gone through the ordeal, our bus seemed to have departed! All was not lost however, and after a delay we managed to get the rest of the way to the city.

It was interesting passing through this area... there seems to be loads of new development going on around Chinese cities, Guangzhou itself is massive, it must have taken 45mins or so to drive through the developing suburbs into the city proper. There was certainly a noticeable difference to HK; the city seemed more backward in a characterful way, but still very developed in a sense. Every street seemed to be lined with markets, make-shift restaurants and vendors selling everything.

We took the city metro to the main train station to see what options there might be for taking a train further into china; (we had decided to try to get to Chengdu, from where we'd back able to enter Tibet, we hoped.) I must say, their metro system really put the London underground to shame! The service was frequent, very cheap (Y4 for the 25 min trip- roughly 30p!), they used a genius 'reusable plastic button' instead of paper tickets, all the platforms were fitted with modern glazed safety doors... I was mildly taken a back. The train station was quite a challenge... there was nothing in the way of English signage, everything was Chinese characters. We attempted to order tickets at a kiosk using a mandarin phrase book, but didn't seem to have too much luck; we had a suspicion that they may have been Cantonese speakers. The queues were pretty bad (the Chinese aren't big fans of queuing), and our lack of language skills and the resulting confusion seemed to result in irritation, which lead to very-loud-speaking-down-the-mic from various kiosk attendants. (It seems standard policy is to embarrass a would-be customer into leaving, by shouting at them from behind you glass screen, should they cause you irritation!) Finally after several aborted attempts, we managed to land some tickets to 'Chongquing'... not so very far from our target city of Chengdu.

We stayed on 'Shamian island' previously used by the Brits to run opium into China. We spent the evening exploring the area... and i was very pleased to buy two bananas for Y1 (15 yuan to the pound, ish! cheapness).

The next day we made our way back to the train station, and had a minor scare at not being able to find our train with only 5 mins before departure! All was well in the end however, and we began the epic 30hr journey to Chongquing. We'd opted for 'hard sleeper' tickets (apparently), which worked out well, i think both myself and Fred were glad of the option to sleep on a flat bed. It was interesting to watch the Chinese countryside roll by... it was how I'd imagined in a way. Cloud covered mountains, small villages nestling in the hills, great plains of rice paddys, rural folk in straw hats driving their livestock and ploughing by hand. Miles and miles rolled by... I was quite surprised to see the wide use of terracing, equivalent to those i'd seen in Peru, although here used for production rather than tourism.

We spent one night in Chongquing. It didn't seem to be to friendly to westerners in general as a place. Our attempts to use an internet cafe were most unnecessarily complex, i even failed in one attempt to buy fruit from a street vendor. We stayed near the centre, very busy, noisy and again a lot of Neon. The next day we took a bus to Chengdu; and learnt much about the Chinese love obsession with 'the motor vehical horn'... i think a good 10 minutes passed when the horn wasn't used. That's a lot of beeping for a 4 hour drive!

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Photos

Chengdu, night one
bloody luxury!

Comments

[Chris]

Chinese whispers
Dear Tom, Sounds great but I can't see your pictures. Try and get a trip on a junk out into the South China see. That's my most abiding memory of my stay in HK. When the big container ships go by you'll pooh your pants. Chris