Buses and Shenzhen or Another travel day from hell

Friday was another amazingly fun travel experience, one that I will be hearing about for some time to come. We woke up and just hung around the hotel in the morning having a nice long breakfast and packing. I surprised myself and managed to pack and shower in under 20 minutes hitting “the time I am walking out the door” – Alan Baird with about 27 seconds to spare.

We got in a cab and he just started driving in completely the wrong direction. It was not his fault thought the cab attendant told him the wrong airport. After a little bit of this, I placed a quick panicked call to Jason to determine the geography of everything and we finally got that we wanted to go the other way and to the maglev train station. Once that was all settled we got there really quickly. It was to a sign though.

The maglev train was lots of quick fun as it was before. This time I was paying attention when the other train flew past and that was pretty cool it really let you know that you were going 432 kmh.

The plane flight was not bad, a little long but not bad. Once in Shenzhen though the fun started. We flew into a city which is not Hong Kong and then were going to take a train or boat into Hong Kong. The reasons for this were multiple, I wanted to see Shenzhen without actually spending time there and it is about a 1/3 of the price. So we got in a taxi and after about 1.5 hours we finally got dropped off in downtown Shenzhen at a bus station. It was around this time that I found out my father has an amazing hatred of buses. My curiosity of this dislike will remain unfulfilled for a while. I believe his response to my question was unprintable in a family blog.

In the bus station you go through customs even though Hong Kong is part of China. Part as in it has its own government, money, phone system that blocks Chinese users from getting service, language and many other things. So we finally get through customs and a really nice guy gets us on the wrong bus into Hong Kong. On the 45 minute drive there you go through customs one more time just for the hell of it. We finally got into Hong Kong 3 hours later and in the wrong part of Kowloon which is really big, for some reason I imagined Hong Kong being all compact and it definitely is not.

After another taxi ride we finally got to our hotel and checked in. The room of course was only one bed so while they fixed that we had dinner at the fancy Philippe Starck designed Felix on the 28th floor with a phenomenal view of both Kowloon and the Island. The food was really good so that made both of us calm down some. After dinner we lounged in the fancy bar for a second and then went home and too bed. We seem to be cursed in flying for some reason so we will see what happens on the return trip.

Last pictures of Shanghai from the room and the lounge when the weather was not so bad.