Shopping mall sauna!

Getting cosy on the train

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[For any travellers out there- if you're heading from Hong Kong to Guillin, go via Shenzen and not Guangzhuo, much easier and quicker and cheaper than LP make out! Sounds like a bloody mission impossible. But it's really not, you can get the commuter train from Tsam Sha Tsui East direct in 40 mins to LO WO ( which is the SAME as Shenzen except on the Hong Kong side of the border! All you have to do is cross the border and you're at the train and bus station!]

Shenzen

so the time had come to leave Hong Kong and head to Guillin, a town in Southern China that has famously been written about by a Chinese poet and excelling all other landscapes in China and so the Chinese are very proud of it. So that's where we were heading. Except Lonely Planet made it sound like bloody mission impossible, turns out the commuter train leaves from right outside our hostel!! So that was that, easy peasy. Would have helped if someone had told us that Shenzen is the same as Lo Wu!!! How is anyone supposed to make sense of this country?? It's the whole cantonese/mandarin thing coming into play. So not only do we have one incomprehensible language ot deal with, but two! Ah but it's all about the challenge, eh?! :)  So we get there no probs at all and just have to cross the border from one SAR into another. And it's worse than an international border control! Queues and x-rays checks for ages- not expecting that at all! Onve in Shenzen we got a flavour of what was to come- suddenly no Englisha ny more at all. Trying to figure out a way to explain an ATM to someone was actually very amusing. we got sent to the ticket counter! Finally found a helpful Chinese that led us throught he craziest shopping centre in the world. Millions of people and millions of cheap designer goods. All at about 40 degrees heat and still with our backpacks on! MENTAL! That's the one word that sums up China! But all went surprisingly smoothly- we'd heard horro stories about not being able to get train tickets for the same day and having to wait for several- but the lady obvioulsy took a shine to our faces and gave it to us no probs. Hard sleeper and all. So had a bit of a day to waste in the town that only hosts said shopping malls. Couldn't quite face it so picked up a tourists brochure and decided we like the look of a raod that flanked Hong Kong on one side and Shenzen on the other. And had historical sights dotted alongside it. Sounded cool. We navigated the busses and all, and even made a friend on the bus. He was learnign English and was actually very sweet. We had a good old chat! In fact turns out we were the first foreigners he'd ever seen! And the first time he'd gotten to speak English! He was very excited. I think he liked us even more after I gave him a Peter Crouch football sticker!!! :) So an hour later we arrive.. in the middle of nowhere! Our new friend something something pi, asks the locals, and they all tell us we're prohinited from going there!!! What a joke! So there's another big barrier and border control and we're not allowed near it! After all that.. ah well, it was interesting to see anyways. And so we left our friend, who was off to have his first look at the sea and went to tourist destination nr 2.... a lookout point on floor 79 of a building. Should have known it would be dodgy. Turns out they wanted 10 Euro entrance and had turned it all into a them park! How I'm not entirely sure. But then how does anyone come up with 'Minsk World'?! Anything goes! Gave that a miss aswell and actually headed back to the shopping centre where Jacq bought a rip-off North Face for the price of the theme park entrance!! The city is crazy though- only functions due to aircon! No-one walks anywhere. Literallly there is noone on the streets! So we managed to navigate the underground aswell, feeling very smug with ourselves!

Such luxury! The usual Chinese privacy rules apply, i.e. there is none!

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Onto the train- again hyper modern station. Not the China I'd been expecting at all. Of course we couldn't understand that the train was actually delayed tho, so five minutes before original departure all the foreigners came out of the woodwork and made a beeline for the attendant to ask what was going on! So that's how we met our first other European, Guillaume! Anyways, getting on the train was again  a bit mental but once on it was actually lovely. Same as European standard with the added luxury of air con and cuddly duvet aswell as soothing Chinese music. Very nice!! 12 hours later we woke up and were in the complete opposite spectrum of China- textbook images of littel chinese people in pointy hats ploughing their rice fields were whizzing past the window! Amazing.