Shenzhen, Guangdong, China
Saturday, June 26, 2010
The train was a hard sleeper - the cheapest sleeper available - an overnight train for a bargain 422 Yuan (45 pounds). My
Paris-
Berlin experience meant I was not doing an overnight seat again. The train was an open dorm series of compartments of 6 beds each, arranged in triple bunks. I had the lower. Despite the name, the bed was soft enough (think of hard as 2nd class and soft as 1st class) and the quality of the carriage was comparable to European trains. The people were very nice, a couple of Philippine tourists, a Chinese businessman who spoke good French but little English (our conversation was a mixture of broken French and broken English - he imports high quality western electronic components for Chinese businesses and the military - there are many western businesses that are not big enough to set up a Chinese office but need a way to get into China - he facilitates this) and a couple of Chinese students. The train supposedly had aircon, but maybe due to the number of the people on the train it was too hot to sleep much.
Arrived at
Shenzhen next morning before 7. Crossing the border and getting to urban
Hong Kong couldn't be easier. From the platform, bilingual signs pointed me 'to Hong Kong' which led me through customs and straight to the metro stop. HK is so small that its metro doubles as its national rail network, so the metro took me straight from the border to the stop for my hostel.
