Last stop - Hong Kong

We left Dali by bus and then our final sleeper train from Kunming to Guanzhou which is close to Hong Kong where we were booked in for a couple of days before flying to Australia (7th Nov).

It is worth describing how the huge number of people who travel by train are managed. It is pretty much the same in all the big towns and more like catching a plane. Tickets are checked as you go into the station and baggage is scanned as in an airport. Inside the station electronic signs tell you which waiting room to go to for each train. In a large town there will be 6 or more waiting rooms, possibly on two floors. The trains are numbered like air flights and most signs have at least some English script so quite easy to identify your train. The waiting rooms hold several hundred people each and have many rows of seats, but this still leaves a lot of people standing. All the passengers cram in here with their usually large amounts of luggage (including ours). Then you sit and ponder the gate signs which tell you whether your train is ready or not. Only when the incoming train is clear of disembarking passengers do they let the hundreds of new passengers on. At this point you usually have to manoevre your luggage along a corridor or two and up and down levels. If you are lucky there is an escalator, otherwise you have to pull your heavy luggage up or down the stairs, aided only by a small flat ramp at the side of the stairs where you can drag it, usually with one wheel not on the ramp. Fortunately helpful young Chinese men often took Liz's suitcase and whisked it up or down the stairs. Once you reach the train the huge crowd magically vanishes into the 15 to 20 carriages. The carriages and seats or beds are numbered so again it is not too difficult to find and each carriage has an attendant who checks the ticket again.

As for getting off at the right stop. After being on board the train for a while the attendant swaps your ticket for a plastic card and puts all tickets for the same stop into a special folder. The tickets show your seat/bed number, so before each stop they come back and make sure all passengers that need to get off are aware of it and swap the tickets back. We were also told it is the personal responsibility of the attendant to make sure everyone gets off at the right stop and to put right any mistakes so they take it very seriously. Having said that, many stations have the name written in roman letters as well as Chinese. As a final back up I also had a database of China for my sat-nav and we could see where we were at any time and how far to our destination, so we never felt at risk of missing the stop.

 

 

Liz took some nice shots from the train which show how the landscape changed between Kunming and Guanzhou.

Every flat surface and wall is used to dry crops at harvest time

Water buffalo could be seen in many places all over rural China, pulling carts or ploughing or frequently just standing in water and grazing. They could often be seen standing with their heads completely under water, grazing from the water weed on the bottom.  

From Guanzou it is possible to reach Hong Kong quite easily though we were not sure of the best way until we got there. It turned out we could get a bullet train directly from Guanzhou station to Shenzen which is right on the border of Hong Kong. From there it is possible to walk into Hong Kong through miles of walkways rather like walking from one terminal to another in an airport. Hong Kong is still treated like a foreign country by the Chinese, but the customs arrangements are quite relaxed.

This was the view from our hotel on HK island. We overlooked the zoo so not too close to the adjacent skyscrapers.

Some hotel staff being given their morning pep talk. This seems to be quite a common routine for employees in China.

A nice park on the island to escape the hustle and bustle.

Typical shopping street. Note bamboo scaffolding on left.

Popular Chinese restaurant in Hong Kong. Reputedly untouched since colonial days. No menus. Food is wheeled around on trolleys and selected by sight and in our case guesswork. Typically Chinese and speedy service - everything whipped away as soon as you stop eating.

Classic nighttime harbour view from mainland across to the island. Frequent ferries cross the harbour to the mainland where the serious shopping goes on, which ranges from ridiculously expensive shops to street markets mostly selling the same tourist stuff we had seen all over China.

This was our last Chinese stop where we caught the plane to Australia.