It's the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)

Sunday, 11/11/2012 – 150 A.D.

Guangzhou! Hello!

At a little before 6 a.m. our train pulled into another city I’d never really heard of until recently. I still don’t know much about it, save that it’s China’s third largest city with an urban population of 11 million people. That’s massive, but we had no time to stick around to take the latest census. After the last couple of nights we’d had, all we wanted to do was get to Hong Kong, which is a couple of hours away by train. Before that though, we had to get past all of the “pretend porters” frantically shouting at us to help us move our bags, all for a hefty fee, of course. They were quite aggressive and not easy to differentiate from the rest of the ticket holders. Speaking of tickets, Tim’s was collected by the man at the gate, but mine was not. Why do they even bother to collect tickets that are date-stamped for a particular journey that has already taken place?

Guangzhou was still dark at this hour, but despite what little of it we could make out, there was no time for sightseeing. We joined the herd of people heading for the taxi rank, needing to get a car to take us across town to Guangzhou East station. And as we walked amongst the crowd, I suddenly realised that I had not written down “Guangzhou East” in Chinese characters for the driver. Nor did I even know how to say the word “East” in Chinese! By the time we got to the front of the queue I’d formed some semblance of a plan. Sure enough, when Tim knocked on the window and said, “Guangzhou East?” the driver had no idea what he meant. Then I held out my train ticket, tapped it repeatedly with my finger and said, “Hong Kong?” Fortunately he understood, but I don’t know what we would have done if my ticket had been collected. Aye, The Road works in mysterious ways.

The driver could have taken us all round the houses, but the impression I get is that in China this type of behaviour is frowned upon. Apparently even leaving a tip is seen as a form of corruption and chances are the waiter will come running after you to give you back what you supposedly forgot. The fare to Guangzhou East (or “Guangzhoudong” as should have been said) came in at 29 yuan, whereas the guidebook said it should be about 30. Best taxi driver I’ve had in all of China!

The booths where you buy the tickets for trains to Hong Kong didn’t open until 07:30, so we had about a 40 minute wait. None of the shops were open, but I had a strange moment when I came across a closed Macdonalds McCafe and felt like I’d run into an old friend. While waiting in my second large, unfamiliar city in under 24 hours, it was oddly comforting to see the universal symbol of the golden arches, even if it was closed. Sure, it’s not the British consulate, but it is a Western institution here in this great Eastern wilderness.

The first train to Hong Kong was full, but we got a couple of seats on the next one at 09:03. Back again we went through passport control. I’m still not really sure about Hong Kong and where it stands. Technically it’s part of China, but it retains its own legal and monetary systems. Due to the former British influence, the two official languages are Chinese (the Cantonese variant) and English. No need to write down any tricky Chinese characters for a few days then! After the last one we went on, this latest train was absolute luxury, despite the strong smell of B.O. coming from an unknown passenger. We may have smelt a bit bad after two days without washing, but I checked and we were no way near that bad! The seats were so soft and comfortable, if only we’d had them to laze on the night before! In fact, I got through about ten minutes of an episode of Red Dwarf before I went out like a light, the first of three snoozey sessions on the two hour journey.

Our entry into Hong Kong went fine and it was only one stop on the immaculate metro system before we arrived at our destination - the infamous Chungking Mansions. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! What can I say about this place – dodgy dealers’ paradise, illegal immigrants’ heaven, or complete filthy sh*thole? Or maybe all three? Chungking Mansions has been around since the 1960s. Most of its 16 floors are accommodation (cheap, tightly-packed accommodation at that), but the first two floors feature dodgy shops, mostly selling hooky electronic goods, and the third floor has restaurants of the kind Gordon Ramsey would never review. There was a film made about the place back in 1994 called Chungking Express which we’re going to watch tonight. And why did we come to this place? Because accommodation in Hong Kong is notoriously expensive and we must have booked it after a night of bad pizza before we’d read the reviews.  Still, it’s a larf, innit?

Sort of. We got a bit lost just walking around the ground floor trying to find the correct lift. There are blocks A to E and we are in D block, booked into the Day and Night Guesthouse on the 10th floor. Only two lifts go to D block, but one goes to even-numbered floors, one to odd-numbered floors. We got in the one for odd-numbered floors, went all of the way up, then had to come all of the way down again. And with 16 floors to choose from, these lifts take ages to move and they hold six people at the most. We finally got to the 10th floor and checked-in, but this was no hotel that you encounter on the street with big sign in lights for all to see, it was akin to going into someone’s flat in a dodgy tower block. And even though reception was on the 10th floor, our room was down on the 6th – it messes with your head if you try and figure out the geography of the place. The cherry on the cake was the dogsbody who was asked to take us to our room – as we waited for the lift he idly used the key in his hand to clean out first his left ear, then his right. I promised myself that if he tried to hand it to me I’d shove it up his nose for a good cleaning – see how he liked that!

Our room is absolutely miniscule. I’m not sure what type of person it is that tries to swing a cat, but if they tried it in here they’d fail. I feel like a battery hen, but without any eggs on tap (breakfast is not included). Our beds are about two feet apart, the door is three feet from them, and there’s no wardrobe. Oh hang on, there is a wardrobe, it’s just been converted into a teeny-weeny bathroom in which you cannot clean your teeth over the tiddly sink without banging the top of your head on the rusty box that passes for a medicine cabinet. It’s the smallest room we’ve had since the YMCA in New York, but I suppose at least here we do have our own bathroom. And it’s not as if we haven’t had enough experience of living in such close quarters with each other! Say it again – it’s a larf, innit?

[Sorry for the bad lighting...it's probably for the best though!]

Yep, think of it as cosy and all will be well. Plus the location is pretty fantastic, situated right in the epicentre of Kowloon, a hugely diverse multi-cultural area that was at one time the most densely-populated place on Earth. Pretty much every backpacker who comes to Hong Kong stays here – there are 1,980 beds in the whole complex. Yoshi, who we hadn’t seen since the Vietnamese border, was also staying here in a few days time. And he'd been here before and was returning, so it couldn’t be all bad! And, as we gave the lifts a wide berth and walked down the six flights of stairs to the ground, exiting onto a grubby side alley, we pretended we didn’t see the two stall owners urinating against the wall. If I don’t think about it then it’s not really there, right? Ha! What was there, or rather what was just two minutes walk from Chungking Mansions was the view across the water of the famous Hong Kong skyline, lit up in its all-conquering glory. A fantastic sight for sore eyes that had seen plenty on the long journey to get here.