August 5, by train to Guangzhou & Shenzhen
I left Quarry Bay early this morning to catch the Kowloon-Canton Express to Guangzhou, in mainland China. A typically convenient Hong Kong bus took me from Chung Wah’s front door directly to Hung Hom station. Once there, I bought a ticket for the next train and settled down to wait for it with coffee and bacon roll (oh bacon, I’ve missed you so much in Doha!). The train was clean and civilised as one would expect from Hong Kong. It even had free wifi, apparently all the way to Guangzhou. But the wifi didn’t work. Two hours later I got off the train, cleared immigration, and was in mainland China.
My immediate task was to buy a train ticket from Guangzhou East to Beijing, departing the same night if possible. I waited in line with hordes of mainland Chinese. When I finally got to the ticket window I was told that tickets to Beijing were completely sold out for today, tomorrow AND the next day.
Damn.
Plan B, try again at Guangzhou main station. I went there by taxi and repeated the same process. Same result. I didn’t have any friends in Guangzhou and had no desire to spend much time there. So finally I decided to take the train to Shenzhen (close to Guangzhou, about 2 hours journey), meet up with a good Chinese friend from the Dalian days, and try again to buy a Beijing ticket.
I arrived in Shenzhen station, tried without success to get a ticket, then went directly to the nearest Starbucks for wifi and planning. My friend turned up a few hours later and we went to a restaurant for a large meal of Asian fusion food and hotpot. It was decided that I would spend the weekend in Shenzhen and try to get a train on Sunday evening. After dinner, I booked into a hotel and zonked out right away on the bed. ZZZ.
