We just got back from a short trip to Hong Kong yesterday morning. It was great, Hong Kong that is, the trip was OK in parts and torturous in other parts. It can be nice to get a different view of things. You know take a look around and realise what you have to be happy about. However the perspective that we got from our little trip to HK was that Nanchang really is a shithole.
Hong Kong was quiet, clean, modern and basically just nice. Nanchang however is rarely any of these things...no really it is quite average at best. So onto to Hong Kong.
We headed off on a 1 hour and 45 minute flight that took us to Shenzhen airport. Shenzhen is a mainland city that has grown in the economic shadow of Hong Kong. It is big and modern and clean-ish and we made our way through it by bus to get to the train station near the Luo Hu border crossing to book our train tickets back to Nanchang. Train tickets are something of a bureaucratic nightmare in China. You can book and buy tickets within five days of the journey. However you can only buy tickets one way. So that means that you can't really book the return leg of your journey until to you are about to leave. This is made more difficult by the fact that you cannot buy return journey tickets from the station that you set out from.
So we were flying to Shenzhen and then getting a sleeper train back so we had to go and buy our tickets from Shenzhen station as they were not available to buy from Nanchang....confusing? Luckily the station is very near to the border crossing so it wasn't too bad. Just a pain in the butt.
As it turned out we couldn't get the 4 soft sleeper tickets that we wanted and had to settle with 2 in a shared cabin. - Soft sleeper is basically just like a 4 bed cabin with its own lights and a lockable door. Nice.- We wanted to book 4 tickets so that we could have the whole cabin to ourselves (rich capitalist pigs, I know) to ensure a nice quiet environment for Penny to (hopefully) get some sleep in. However it was not to be so we sucked it up and headed across the border into Honkers.
We were staying at the YWCA Gardenview hotel in Central so we had an hour or so on the Hong Kong MTR (Mass Transit Rail) with two station changes. This wasn't too bad although the day was beginning to drag and we were all very nearly done in when we arrived at the hotel at about 8 pm. The hotel is on MacDonnell road in the mid-levels on the edge of Wan Chai and Central (I think) which means that it is basically up a big hill.
The YWCA Gardenview
It also means that there are great views out of the windows overlooking the Hong Kong Zoological Gardens. We settled in and ordered some Indian food (whoo hoo!!!) and hit the hay. The next morning we headed down to the buffet breakfast and then over the road into the gardens. It was overcast and looked like rain so we packed the umbrellas and headed off. The Zoological gardens are nice. Really lush, clean and peaceful. They are also home to quite a few primates, birds and a couple of reptiles. The birds were closest to the hotel and we were quite surprised to see flamingos and cranes along with the pheasants and hornbills. Penny wasn't too interested at this and just wanted to see the monkeys.
Looking back up to the misty peak.
In the Gardens.
More of the same...
The mid-levels in the mist.
So we kept going through the bird cages and finally made it to the primates. Lemurs, Macaques, gibbons (yes they were funky gibbons), and even a pair of orangutans. Michelle and I were interested but Penny was over them before we even finished looking at them. She wanted to see the crocodiles, ooh look at that little gibbon on its' Mummy's tummy, I want to see the crocodiles. Wow look at the big funny orangutans, I want to see the crocodiles. That lemur is being funny isn't he? I want to see the crocodiles! So we went to see the crocodiles. There were two, they were about 2 feet long and didn't move. Needless to say...unimpressed. So we wandered a little more around the countless fountains and beautifully manicured lawns and then headed down into town for morning tea.
One of the mighty Tangs!!
The shops in Central are a little daunting. They are all Ferregamo, Versace, Prada, Chloe, Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent and the like. That isn't surprising in China I guess. However they were all REAL!!!!! The streets were surprisingly empty which was a nice change as the streets of Nanchang are always teeming, the kind of push your way through teeming that slows down everything and just annoys the hell out of you (well me anyway, you know when people just dawdle along in a big line taking up all of the footpath...well they inverted that in China too). We found a Starbucks as it started to rain and sat down for a latte and cake stop. While I am not a fan of Starbucks' coffee something about beggars and choosers springs to mind. We had a little more of a wander then back to the hotel for Penny's sleep.
Is that the Peak up there?
Michelle had a kip as well and I headed off for a little reconnoiter. The rain increased as I wandered along MacDonnell Rd and found my way to Hong Kong Park. It was another lovely park and had something quite remarkable...a giant playground!!! Not just any playground either, it was a five level, split story, multi mega play complex the like of which Penny had not seen, let alone played in for about 7 months.
The ever delightful and beauteous Michelle.
Another nice surprise was the Park and Shop supermarket next door to the hotel. It was awesome, English magazines, fresh cuts of beef and lamb, VB, Crown, Boags, shortbread creams, and Barbecue shapes!!!! It also had some nice curry mixes so we stocked up with a couple of visits. That night was fish, chips and onion rings from the Chippy delivered to the hotel. Noice!
The next morning straight after breakfast we headed to the uber-playground in Hong Kong park. Penny had a ball and played on literally everything she could. After dragging her away from the slides, bouncing horsey type things and diggers we headed off to check out the walk through aviary and the rest of the park. It was cool, lots of fountains, waterfalls and birds of course (in the aviary and out of it).
An awesome digger in the sandpit ...Penny liked it too!
So much playground and so little time...
Swingers.
A rare sighting of the Lesser Eastern Malawian Crested Pigeon Tit...or something. Taken in the walk through aviary...not the supermarket.
We then made our way down to Admiralty and another Starbucks for coffee and cake. We were greeted by even more exclusive shops, in the same vein as those in Central, and managed to find a toy shop that didn't stock Versace dummies and YSL block sets. We bought Penny a little tube full of Australian animals, a cockatoo, koala, taipan, crocodile, wombat - 12 in all and very cool. Then we were back to the hotel to get ready for our return trip to Nanchang.
This started off well and we made our way back along the MTR through the border crossing and back to Shenzhen station to wait for the train. This all went fairly well and Penny even managed to have a sleep. Although this was difficult as it was while we were on the MTR standing holding her with one hand and trying to hold onto something with my other hand to stop us both crashing to the floor. After about 40 minutes of this a nice man stood and let Michelle sit so she could hold Penny and give my arms a rest, everyone else just kind of looked at the floor or something else. It reminded me of when I ask for a volunteer in my class...everyone suddenly finds something really interesting on their book. Anyway customs was easy and we made it through the usual chaotic shambles of boarding a Chinese train to find ourselves in our shared soft sleeper cabin about to set off to Nanchang.
A waterfall in the Hong Kong Gardens.
As I mentioned before we had to share the cabin and at first it looked like we were in luck. A little old lady and a shy young lady. fortunately neither seemed to speak much English and didn't rate them selves as any kind of cross cultural entrepreneur so all was quiet...for the moment. You knew that was coming right? There is always some kind of drama when attempting anything in China.
The drama in this story was in the form of the old lady's daughter. She stormed into the cabin about an hour into the journey and started to execute her authority. She fussed over her mother and questioned the other lady traveller. She then turned her attentions on the Lao wai, in particular Penny. Penny had been playing quietly with her Australian animal tube and was quite happy to keep doing so. The daughter though wanted her attention and after repeated attempts to get it through language (Penny not speaking much Chinese of course) she reached out and took a handful of Penny's toys and made a grand show of putting them into her bag. Hilarious fun apparently, and Penny just sat there confused fighting tears. She gave them right back as soon as the lip started trembling but the damage was done. The Chinese lady thought that this was great fun and kept asking if Penny was angry. Penny was sad although there were a couple of other people that were pretty angry (Michelle wanted, and still wants to punch her lights out). I don't know if this kind of thing could be put down to cultural understanding, or the different way that people play with their kids in China (teasing seems to be pretty common)...or maybe she was just an arsehole, after all they have them here in China too. So we packed Penny's toys away from the annoying lady and attempted to get some sleep. Eventually the annoying lady swaggered back to where she came from in her denim look tights, big white shirt and vest. Serenity? Not quite...
We eventually got Penny settled and Michelle nearly had her asleep when the annoying cow returned. She threw the door open and started checking on her mum (who was asleep until then) and thumping around knocking things over. She then climbed into the bed with her aged mother and pulled up the single blanket and went to sleep. No bets taken on if she snored.....It was like someone had a chainsaw in the compartment. She also managed to kick over her forgotten glass of hot water onto my shoes in the night during one of her more severe somnambulistic contortions. Michelle dubbed her the pig woman and has since left a little bitter reservoir of bile in her heart just for her...should we ever meet again. As we left the cabin for our 4:30 am arrival at Nanchang she silently slid over into one of our beds and started counting a giant wad of notes. Probably the savings that she makes from regularly buying one sleeper ticket and then sharing the bed with her long suffering mother.
Anyway we made it back, even though the University managed to stuff up our pick up at the station again...So we love Hong Kong and Nanchang is looking crappier than ever...sigh!
