"travel" in Weblog

A couple of mates of mine recently came back from Tanzania and looking at their photos, particularly the ones of Zanzibar with the beautiful mix of what looks like Arabic, Indian and Roman architecture, got me thinking. I know very little about Africa between Egypt and South Africa. So I bought a couple of books. But they all strongly advice checking out current travel advice before making any plans. Over on the Foreign & Commonwealth Office’s website they have a nice long list of places you should and shouldn’t go… Which is great except that I discovered that my geography is patchy at best and I can’t place half the African countries on a map.

I decided that what I really needed was a map. A little scraping, some geolocation (with a manually added exception for Georgia to make sure it got pinned next to Russia and not South Carolina) and a Google Map later I had something working. Nothing too fancy but it’s already proved to be dead handy for me so I thought I’d put it live. And thus I present the Foreign & Commonwealth Office Travel Advice map.

Missed travel connections seems to be becomming a theme for my holiday. Emma and I were supposed to be flying to Shanghai last Sunday but we were told at check-in that her visa wasn’t valid. Hong Kong airport has check-in facilities in Central, which is an absolutely brilliant service, making the process almost entirely painless. Normally. It also meant that we were near the China Travel Service office, that issues visas. Emma headed over there to try and get her passport sorted, intending to catch a later flight while I continued on to the airport because my tickets weren’t changeable. After some frantic phone calls from the boarding gate we finally decided that the visa just wasn’t going to get sorted out in time so I had to walk away from the flight, get my bag offloaded and go sit in customs while they cancelled the exit stamp in my passport. They actually put a big stamp saying ‘cancelled’ over the exit visa, which is going to make immigration interesting for the rest of my passport’s natural life. Ah well.

It all worked out okay in the end though. We were able to go on the Pro-democracy march instead and spent a couple of lazy days in Hong Kong shopping. Word to the wise: apparently Granville Road is absolutely amazing for women’s clothes… I’ve been going there for years and had never been particularly impressed but Emma loved it - loads of little boutique-type places selling indie designer items. We were there for hours!

Emma flew home on the Tuesday and I hooked up with my mate George for a quick trip into China. On Wednesday we were up early and on the high speed ferry from Kowloon to Shenzhen, which was very efficient and, as far as I can tell, is the easiest way to get to the airport from Hong Kong. From there we jumped an internal flight to Xian with Hainan Airlines. I was expecting a hamster powered flying box with wings made out of egg cartons and sticky-back plastic but we got a brand spanking new Airbus that delivered us to central China exactly on time.

Xian was a bit of a surprise. I was expecting the city to be quite big but with a small town feel, since the city center is cut off from the rest of the sprawl by restored city walls, but it is SO much bigger than that. The taxi from the airport took perhaps an hour and a quarter, with most of that time spent driving through sprawling suburbs. The rest of the time passed sitting in horrendous traffic and dodging other cars, pedestrians and donkey carts as everyone competed for road space, changing lanes at will, cutting through gaps and occasionally dashing against the traffic to gain position. I’ve never seen anything quite like it!

The most surprising thing has been the pollution. Visibility is perhaps half a mile, muting all light and destroying the famous views from the Great Goose Pagoda and the city walls. It’s a city of 7 million people so I should have expected all this really. While I’m on the subject, the horrendous air quality in Hong Kong and macao also shocked me, although this is apparently the fault of their ugly, unregulated cousin Shenzhen (who lives just up the Pearl River delta). I’ve not seen a sunset in weeks - the sun just disappears into a yellow haze about 15 degrees above the horizon. We woke up this morning to a beautiful orange sky silhouetting a monster coal-burning power station somewhere South of Datong belching heavy smoke from its stacks. I guess air pollution is a problem common to many of China’s cities…

That’s it for first impressions. I’ll get cracking on what I’ve actually been doing now. Back in a bit!

I’m currently in Hong Kong! I’ll be here for a couple of weeks before heading over to Shanghai for a few days and Xian after that to take a look around.

Things could have started more smoothly… While I was walking to the train station on Monday morning, bag on my back, I got a call from my mate George in Hong Kong to say that the place I was staying had accidentally cancelled my room booking. They wouldn’t have another available until Friday. Great. Then I arrived at the airport to find that Cathay had misplaced my seat booking as well. Again, great. I was travelling standby and the flight was overbooked so even after they found my listing I still had to wait until 10mins before the gates closed to be given my ticket. A sprint through customs ensued, finishing in record time: 7mins from check-in to boarding, 3mins to spare!

The flight was awesome, once I got on. I had a jump seat, which was up in front of first class and incredibly comfy. A couple of movies and a decent kip later, we landed in Hong Kong. Because I was one of the last people on the plane, my bag was one of the first off so I was out of HK customs and on a train into town in about 15mins, to be met by George and a fried breakfast.

We spent the day sorting out an alternative hotel (Garden View, facing out over Central and Admiralty, giving me a grandstand view of the city lights) and checking out my old camera kit and electronics shopping haunts. Geeky? Yep. Oh, and I narrowly escaped being sharked by an old chap playing some kind of card game. He saw Gerorge and I watching and offered us a game for money. It seemed to be something a little like snap, where the players take it in turns to throw down a stick-like card and then try to pair it up with one of the ones already on the table. My pathetic Cantonese vocab includes ‘No, thank you’ so I walked away with my cash intact.

Hong Kong hasn’t changed at all since I was last here. I can still remember my way around and it’s still as entertaining as ever just to wander around. I don’t have anything planned until Saturday so I intend to take it easy, steal lots of photos and book my flight to Xi an for early December…