E

After seven very pleasant weeks in Beijing it was time to move on. It was getting cold so we wanted to move south to warmer climates and our three month visa (extended from its original two months) only had six weeks left. So we set off to follow an irregular line south 2900 km to Hong Kong.

When we started we had a pretty poor idea of what we'd encounter. We did of course know about the biggest cities such as Shanghai and Nanjing, but we wanted to see some of the "inbetween". After lots of study of the map and the "Lonely Planet" travel guide we were off on the early morning of November 1, 1999.

By the time we arrived in Hong Kong we had lots of wonderful memories and photographs but overall we had barely scratched the surface of China. Consider this: China has slightly more area than the USA while the populated parts (which exclude Tibet and the deserts) are about the same size as eastern USA or Europe. Our trip was the equivalent in the USA of spending seven weeks in New York City, then spending about a week each in Boston, Newport (Rhode Island), Washington DC, and Chicago with a few days in the mountains of West Virginia. 

The equivalent in Europe would be seven weeks in Paris (we spent 10 there), a week each in London, Munich, Strasbourg, and Milan, with a few days in the Italian Dolomites. You can see from this how much we missed. 

Our odyssey to Hong Kong went vaguely as planned, but not quite. We had thought that we would spend two weeks working our way south to Shanghai, then two weeks in Shanghai, and then two weeks working our way to Hong Kong. However, we liked the places that we got to before Shanghai so much that we stayed longer in them than expected and we found Shanghai uninteresting (after so much time in Beijing) so we cut our stay there short.

Our schedule was heavily dictated by the need to leave China when our visas expired, December 12. In our original thoughts, before we knew that we would have visa problems, we had expected to stay a month or more in Shanghai.

Entering Hong Kong

Our last stop before Hong Hong was Shenzhen. In Shenzhen our hotel was a few blocks from the train station; from our 25th floor room we could see the border and the northern hills of Hong Kong. But we could not figure out how to take the train directly from Shenzhen to Hong Kong. After many attempts at the train station,  asking in various hotels, and trying to understand the Lonely Planet,  we gave up. To get out of China and into Hong Kong we literally walked, dragging our luggage, from our Shenzhen hotel, down the main street past the train station and through the Chinese emigration building and across a connecting bridge to the Hong Kong immigration building and then into the connecting railway station in Lo Wu. Later we were to learn this is the way it's always done: first immigration and then train, not the other way around.

From the exit of immigration, already technically in the Hong Kong S. A. R. (Special Administrative Region) we took a train to Kowloon, a taxi to Central Hong Kong, and a ferry to Lamma Islandwhere we were to stay. And then we dragged our luggage carts up the hill about 200 feet in height (about a 20 story building). It's rather rural, with only paths and no roads or cars. By 3 p.m. we were exploring the place.