Lost on Planet China!!

Chaos!

12th January 2010

Today we headed to Guangzhou from Hong Kong, a handy 2 hour journey ...that part of the journey was fine!. We arrived in China and went through immigration, it took me a little bit longer due to my differing appearence (had no beard when I got my passport picture taken so had to play a bit of spot the difference)...After immigration we went through the various scanners and we were into China. That was the easy part. 

We went down to a kiosk with 'Tourist Information', that was about as much use as a hole in the head, they wouldn't tell us the name of the bus station to get a bus to Yuangshou, all 

they were interested in was selling us tickets that were over double what we eventually paid for them....but that again wasn't the hard part.We figured out we had to go to the main train station, we had fuck all help from the English speaking Chinese as they were trying to solicit some business and generally lurked around the stations in search of lost foreingers. I only saw 2 more foreigners over the course of the day. We got on the subway to the main station, obviously not a done thing by many foreigners as they were fasinated by me, I even caught some taking a sly picture with their phones...I can see the headlines tomorrow...'Werewolf spotted on China Subway'.

We arrived at the main station and our day was about to take a dump when we went for exit A, crowds of people everywhere it was chaos, I have to say the Chinese people are very helpful but they can't speak much English so it was very difficult, we talked to the police and they had a few words but were very forthcoming and didn't mind helping, soon a crowd of people were around us pointing different directions. We decided to go to the station and "queued" to get in, the word queue doesn't exist in the Asian language as I've learnt..When we were in the queue some guy told us the trains were all full and we could only get bus but wasn't very forthcoming with the information on where the buses are, we followed him * BIG MISTAKE *.He told us the bus was about to leave and we had to run, so we were rushing for god knows what reason through stations and across roads and jumped into a tuktuk when we arrived at this dinky little travel agent down a laneway. They tell us the price is another $10, we just walked away, then they called us back and said OK but we weren't paying until we saw the bus first. This guy tells us to follow him, we went up roads, across roads, back accross roads, down side roads for about half an hour, looking back we should have walked away but we werre desperate. We finally arrived and there's no bus there and 2 others in the yard with heads under the bonnet fixing them. I got seriously pissed off and told him to forget about it, the guy didn't have a word of English and put me onto someone on his phone that spoke it, at this stage it was all too suspicious anyway so we shook him off in a shopping centre and then snook into a tuktuk 10 minutes later to get out of there.

The tuktuk took us abit past the main station and I refused to pay him the full amount, well Tina said not to. He just went on his way. We had to get another subway back to the mainstation then we studied the exit plan and realised we had to go through D4, we arrive at D4 and it's closed, lovely, I work it out we can go through another exit, as were walking down the other tunnel the guy who approcahed us earlier was lurking about and asked what happened, I said 'too dodgy' and he looked pissed off but there was nothing he could do, at this stage Tina was ready to throw the towel in, Me being the optomist said lets just see whats at the end here...Exit F...Guandong Bus Station...There was a foreigner counter where we went up to, they told us there was a bus at 20:30 and it was nearly half of what the dodgies were looking for, we sat down and laughed about the last 6 hours...probably the longest of the trip so far.

The bus arrived and it wasn't a sleeper, but we already knew that but it did have big armchairs and lots of leg room. The bus was flooring it and it set off every speedcamera on it's travels. We were the only foreigners on the bus and we seemed to be somehwat of a novelty. The journey was supposed to take 13 hours, about 5 hours in we hear "Yangshou" shouted, we were fast asleep and Tina was worried this was the wrong place, we happened to write the name of a street in our notebook in English & Chinese earlier so we showed it to the driver and some passers by and they said we were here..So 01:30am and nowhere booked and 5 hours ahead of schedule, we walked down towards this street and 

found one place that was full, there was a few others that had people asleep, this one guy called me into his when he saw us. Tina went up and inspected the oom and everything was good including the price.

So far China seems very developed, including stellar motorways and transport..Lets hope things will get better. BTW, it's fucking freezing.