Night train to Shanghai

Night train to Shanghai [Enlarge]

Our marathon 26 hour train ride turned out to be our most relaxing long distance journey so far. Here's the story.

Hung Hom station, Hong Kong's mainline railway station, was easy to find. We took the MTR to Tsim Sha Tsui, walked through a subterranean tunnel to the KCR (Kowloon Canton Railway) station, caught a subway train (almost indistinguishable from the MTR but run by the train company) and got off at Hung Hom. The station concourse is home to a variety of shops and eateries. We still had some credit on our Octopus cards so we had a quick lunch at McDonalds (who accept Octopus), and then found an Octopus-friendly convenience store to buy something to eat on the train.

Hong Kong departure formalities were handled in an airport-style way and we spent the last fifteen minutes in a 'boarding gate' area. We weren't quite sure how the Chinese immigration would be organised—would we stop at the border and get off, or would the officials board the train and go carriage-to-carriage as they had in Europe? The 15:00 train departed at exactly 15:00 and we found ourselves on our own in a four-person compartment. Since the train went all the way to Shanghai with no stops we had no worries that anyone else would be joining us en route and so we could stretch out and relax. We got talking to some Americans in the next carriage who had come to China for a car rally, but it had been cancelled, so they had decided to jump on a train and see where it took them. We came away with an open invitation to stay with one of them at his homes in Washington and Utah states. This is our second invitation to stay with Americans (the other is a family in upstate New York who we met when we went quad biking and white water rafting in northern Thailand). Of all the people we have spent time speaking with on this trip, many of the most friendly, kind-hearted and broad-minded ones have been American. They often get a tough time abroad, but they shrug it off with great dignity and it never dents their friendliness.

Hung Hom station is in the north-eastern suburbs of Kowloon so it didn't take long for us to leave the city behind. As the urban high-rise turned to rural low-rise and the concrete became fields, the skies cleared and the sun came out. The cloud that had shrouded the city for our whole stay was highly localised, we guess it's a combination of moisture from the sea and traffic pollution. With absolutely no fanfare we crossed the Chinese border. If we hadn't been looking out of the window at the time we would have missed the simple barbed-wire fence and river crossing. There was no stop, and no officials came through the train. We had read that the train might stop at Shenzen or Dongguan for border formalities, but it didn't. The conductor came through the train and filed our tickets in a plastic folder, giving us little credit-card sized tickets in return. This procedure is done (we think) so that they can work out where everybody is getting off, and come through the train to wake people up if they are getting off the train during the night. He spoke no English but using sign language we managed to ask him when our passports would be stamped. He seemed to say that it would be done at Shanghai, at the end of the journey.

We spent a pleasant few hours watching Guangzhou (Canton) province slide past the windows. It looked different from Hong Kong, but no less developed, with more building work going on everywhere. After it got dark at about 18:30, we read the complimentary Sunday paper we had got in the hotel, did the quick crossword, then had an early night.

When we awoke the next morning it was raining—proper rain like we get in Britain, the incessant type with small, miserable, drenching droplets. Everything looked wet: the fields, the cows, the people. We felt nice and cosy in our bunks so we stayed in bed until midday watching the scenery and this time tackling the cryptic crossword which the Hong Kong paper had syndicated from the British Daily Telegraph. The conductor came back to take back our plastic ticket substitutes and swap them back for the real ones. We got up in time for lunch, which consisted of the remainder of the cheese buns and cashew nuts that we had brought with us. Having spent some more time chatting to the Americans, we arrived on time (to the minute), at Shanghai. We hadn't been bored at all, and we had had a comfortable sleep. The journey hadn't felt anything like 26 hours, in fact it had gone much more quickly than some of our previous butt-numbing epics (Belgrade to Sofia and Mumbai to Margao spring immediately to mind) and yet it had been twice as long. Overnight is definitely more relaxing than all day.

We packed up our bags and left the train, into a fenced off area which funnelled us into the station building and through Chinese passport control. The official was friendly and the necessary stamp was forthcoming. We walked through the customs area with no problems. Waiting just outside the station was a smiley lady from the local tourism board, holding a board saying "Glenn Livett". Having welcomed us to Shanghai, she led us round the side of the station to a waiting MPV and we drove off to our hotel to check in.

Just as getting the China visa had been simple and painless, so was the process of getting in. The horror stories on the web about stroppy border guards, lengthy luggage searches and problems like guide books being confiscated because their maps showed Taiwan in a different colour from China, proved to be hyperbole, just as the visa tales had. We're refreshed and happy, not at all stressed and, most important of all we're finally in China!

p.s. Blogspot is not currently being blocked in China, so we can post about how much we are enjoying being here!

Day 121
Hong Kong to Shanghai

This map shows the route we took in this post. Click it to see larger maps of our whole route at flickr.

Maps are taken from the CIA World Factbook.

Final preparations for China

Tsim Sha Tsui neon [Enlarge]

The immigration queues at the Macau ferry terminal had been so long when we arrived, that we didn't want to take any risks getting delayed and missing our boat, so we got to the port nice and early for our 15:15 sailing back to Hong Kong. Naturally sod's law applies under these circumstances, and so the immigration process turned out to be quick and easy, and we found ourselves in the departure lounge 90 minutes early with nothing to do. An earlier boat was departing, and so on the off chance that they'd let us on, we approached the desk with our tickets. They barely even glanced at them, before attaching a sticker onto each ticket showing a seat assignment, and waving us through. Excellent! We just got to our seats before the boat began to move.

At the Hong Kong ferry terminal we paused only to top up our Octopus cards (electronic money cards which you load up with cash and then wave at a reader on every form of public transport except taxis, and even in some restaurants and shops), then went downstairs to the convenient subway station from where we caught a train across the island to the Wanchai/Causeway Bay area and our new hotel. It's so easy to get around in Hong Kong. There's always an easy alternative to walking or getting a taxi.

Our China tour starts this afternoon. We booked it with a company based in Xi'an, TravelChinaGuide.com. They arranged our train tickets from Hong Kong to Shanghai and said they would have them delivered to our hotel in Hong Kong. Since we didn't think we could trust that anything delivered to Chungking Mansions would actually get to us, we booked a more traditional hotel for our last two nights here. Sure enough, an envelope containing two tickets was waiting for us at reception when we checked in to The Charterhouse Hotel. After our last experience with a pre-booked tour, where we were abandoned overnight in cold Turkish bus stations and generally messed around at every stage, we were apprehensive that we would once again end up feeling that it would have been a lot less hassle to do everything ourselves. But so far everything is going to plan with Travel China Guide.

We've been watching the weather reports for mainland China with some interest over the past few weeks, and we saw a couple of weeks ago that Beijing (which is in the far north of China) experienced a heavy snowfall. By the time we reach Beijing it will be a month later, and hopefully spring will have sprung enough to make more snow unlikely. Nevertheless it's probably going to be colder than we've had it for some time, especially since we'll be staying up a mountain later this week at Huangshan. We no longer had our jumpers (US: sweaters), long ago given away to a grateful cleaner in Goa. So for once we actually wanted to visit a mall, to find some more warm clothes. We went across the road to the mall at Times Square.

Glenn found a jumper easily. Just like he would do at home if he wanted a simple, reasonably priced jumper, he went to the quintessentially British and übersensible Marks and Spencer. Within moments he had found the reasonably priced jumpers section and was perusing a choice of five different styles: cashmere blend, acrylic, or cotton, round- or v-neck, with contrasting trim, ribbed or plain. In the end he opted for a supersoft v-neck acrylic (so quicker drying!) which boasted on the label that the yarn was anti-pill, i.e. it won't go bobbly as quickly as acrylic jumpers usually do. Whether it will survive longer than our socks—we've gone through three pairs between us so far—remains to be seen. The best thing was that it was in the sale and only cost us 150 Hong Kong dollars (GBP 9.76 / USD 19.20)

So that was Glenn sorted. Finding a jumper for Isla should have been just as easy. As in every mall in the world, there are five womenswear shops for every menswear one, but as usual they are all so ridiculously fashion obsessed that at the time of looking, the only type of women's jumper available in the entire mall came with puff-sleeves, plastic buttons the size of saucers, or some form of frill or runching. Yes, The Eighties are back in Hong Kong in a big way! And to think that one of the reasons we left home was to get away from the return of surely the worst decade in the entire history of human fashion. The only thing we didn't see was huge shoulder pads—are they back in fashion back home yet? Anyway, we covered all eight floors of the mall, and Isla got all pink-in-the-face from dashing in and out of changing rooms hoping that things would look better on her than they did on the hanger. They never did. About 19:30 we took a pit-stop and went for a spaghetti carbonara and a beer at the nearest branch of Spaghetti House. Refilling our empty tummies and resting our aching feet gave us a new lease of life and we decided that instead of getting a jumper, Isla would buy a new shirt to replace her now somewhat stained and tatty Rohan one that she'd started the journey with. We went back up to the North Face shop and bought a very nice, hi-tech, quick drying shirt that we'd seen several hours earlier, again a bargain sale item. So why didn't we just buy a North Face fleece too? Firstly, because we'll probably be getting rid of it again in a few weeks, and secondly because when you only have one outer garment, you need it to cover every eventuality. It must be warm and smart and casual and lightweight and quick drying and cheap and not too spot the Western tourist—something, in other words, which is boring. If it gets really cold in mainland China, Isla will either buy the first piece of knitwear she can find, put both her T-shirts on under her shirt, or steal Glenn's jumper.

The following day we headed across the island again towards the Central–Mid-Levels Escalator to visit Flow second-hand bookshop. We're leaving the scope of our current guidebook so, like all guidebooks that have gone before, it can't come with us any further. We hoped to replace it with something to help us master a little of the Chinese language. We checked that Flow buys books as well as selling them, then we set about browsing the shelves. As we were looking an American couple came in. They had seven paperback fiction books to get rid of and asked what Flows would pay for them. The answer was 35 dollars (GBP 2.28 / USD 4.48) for the lot, five dollars each. This was about a fifth of the price that they would go back on sale for. The couple didn't negotiate, they just wandered off moaning about it. Eventually we settled on a funny old book about Chinese characters and something a little newer with a CD and pinyin translations. The combined price of the two items was 133 dollars. We worked out that we had paid the equivalent of 70 dollars for our guidebook when we bought it second hand in Bangkok, so we reckoned we'd do well if we got half that—it's got a bit battered around the edges with us over the past month, and besides, we don't begrudge the shop a fair profit. It's been a while since India and our bartering skills haven't seen much action for a while—did we still have it? Of course—bargaining is like riding a bike! We got 33 dollars for it, leaving us with a nice round 100 to pay for the Chinese books.

Finally we topped up on toothpaste and conditioner. Not that it won't be possible to buy usual everyday things there, but it's easier in Hong Kong where English is an official language and we can easily find familiar brands. So now we are all sorted for the train ride to Shanghai. It's going to be a 26 hour marathon—our longest transport experience ever—and after so much planning and anticipation, we will finally get to use the first entry of our double entry Chinese visa! We have got two bunks in a four-bunk 'soft-sleeper' compartment (the second of three classes). We've even got some Western biscuits to share with our companions as ice breakers. Hopefully, assuming they're Chinese, they won't have brought anything too strange to share with us.

Incidentally, we've been led to believe that Blogger's blogspot domain (the blogging platform and domain that we use) is blocked in China from time to time. It was most recently blocked in February this year and as far as we understand is still blocked. It is possible therefore that this will be our last post for a while. We will keep writing the posts on the laptop though, so if it all goes quiet, look out for a flood of new posts sent from South Korea on 25th April! And as for why we need a second entry into China? Hopefully, by then we will have used it and all will be revealed.

Day 119
Macau to Hong Kong

This map shows the route we took in this post. Click it to see larger maps of our whole route at flickr.

Maps are taken from the CIA World Factbook.

Some more things we did in Hong Kong

Des Voeux Road, Hong Kong [Enlarge]

Hong Kong is geographically part of the Guangdong (Canton) province of China, and so its language and cuisine are Cantonese. Naturally we felt obliged to sample a bit of the local fare, and what better way to try Cantonese food than to have a spot of dim sum? The locals eat these little steamed snacks for breakfast and/or lunch, and we stumbled across an excellent, very reasonable, and very popular restaurant called Mu Dan Ting in the Tsim Sha Tsui area of Kowloon. Everything is highrise here so like most restaurants it doesn't have a ground floor level, just a lectern-style stand on the street with a menu for you to peruse and a member of staff to point you to the lift and send you up to the correct floor. It turns out that Mu Dan Ting is a popular place for Kowloon office workers to go for lunch. For just over 100 Hong Kong dollars (GBP 6.52 / USD 12.80) we filled ourselves up with a selection of delicious dim sum and drank as much jasmine tea as we could.

We're getting better at the chopsticks, but the bottom line is it's embarrassing using them in front of Chinese people. Chinese babies can handle them better than us. The locals are very polite and don't laugh at us, at least not to our faces, but we know they think we're from an uncivilised culture where you sit down to eat wielding the same implements as a butcher uses. Still, we are now skilled enough to eat our noodles with chopsticks, and even cashew nuts in special slippery sauce.

We followed up our tasty lunch with a trip to the space museum and planetarium. On the way to the museum we discovered one of Hong Kong's surprise malls. Hong Kong has more shopping malls than any city could ever need, and you come across them just when you're least expecting it. This one was in the subway under Salisbury Road. You descend the stairs expecting it to be like any other simple subway to cross the road, but then it opens out in to a cavernous underworld of designer boutiques and food outlets. Shopping is such a serious business here that there's even a network of elevated, covered walkways linking the buildings on Hong Kong island so that you can keep out of the rain or sun and away from the streets. Typhoons, heatwaves, rush-hour traffic: nothing need spoil your spending!

We discovered our next surprise mall the very next day. This one was up a mountain. One reason that Hong Kong real estate is so expensive is that only a thin strip of land on the coast is suitable for building on. Continuous coastal reclamation is creating new land, but fundamentally the problem is that there's a mountain range right behind the city. A popular viewpoint in these hills is The Peak, to which some enterprising soul built a funicular railway (the Peak Tram) in the nineteenth century to take tourists and pleasure-seeking colonialists to the top. No doubt the Victorians were content with a cream tea and a nice view, but these days the modern visitor demands more, so there's a mall at the top. Obviously. And this is no small, token-gesture mall—it's the real thing.

The Peak is well worth a visit even if you're not in the mood for shopping. We decided to take the scenic route from Kowloon, starting with the famous Star Ferry across the harbour. You can pay HKD 2.20 for the top deck or HKD 1.70 for the lower deck. The extra three pence (6 US cents) doesn't seem to buy you anything extra, in case you're wondering. From the ferry pier we walked for ten minutes across town past the beautiful No. 2 International Finance Centre (Two IFC), currently the tallest building in Hong Kong and fifth tallest in the world. A little way further inland we reached the foot of the Central–Mid-Levels Escalator. This is an 800 metre system of escalators and travelators that whisk you all the way up the hill from Central District to the Mid Levels, above SoHo district. It's the world's longest escalator system, apparently, and it's free to use, taking seventeen minutes to get to the top. In the morning rush-hour it runs downhill, then from 10:20 it runs uphill.

From the top of the escalator, amongst the commuter suburbs, we walked through the botanical and zoological gardens, again another freebie, stopping to gawp at and be gawped at by various comedy primates and a sleepy leopard, and worked our way back down the hill towards the Peak Tram terminus. It was a long way round, but worth it to see some extra Hong Kong sights on the way. The view from The Peak was stunning, although it was a bit cloudy; the top ten floors of the Two IFC tower were actually in the clouds.

Beach on Lamma Island [Enlarge]

Hong Kong S.A.R. has many rural islands and we didn't want to leave without visiting one. Yesterday we took the short trip to Lamma Island—we chose this one mainly because there are ferries to and from villages on either side of it, with a pleasant walk across the island linking the two ports. The island is car-free. Most people use bicycles to get around, and the local council has a fleet of golf buggies for jobs like refuse collection and park maintenance. Another thing the island has is a huge power station generating electricity for virtually all of Hong Kong's residents. It's a bit of an eyesore in the otherwise pristine landscape of golden beaches and jungled hills, but something has to drive all that neon. Our plan for the end of our walk had been to have lunch at one of the many excellent fish restaurants in the village of Sok Kwu Wan. However the restaurants were all the type of establishment where the menu is still alive when you sit down, swimming around happily in bubbling tanks. It wasn't long since breakfast and we weren't really hungry—and at a time when we didn't need to eat, it just seemed wrong to be the cause the demise of another creature. So we caught the first ferry back to Hong Kong.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new Favourite City. Just eleven days after leaving Bangkok, it has sadly been knocked from the top spot (but only just). There is so much to do here and we wish we could stay for much longer.

We're off now to catch the TurboJet high-speed ferry to Macau on the other side of the Pearl River delta. Macau is another former European colony (Portuguese) which has recently returned to Chinese control as a Special Administrative Region. It has had a very different history and culture to Hong Kong, and it will be interesting to compare the two cities. In a few days we'll be back in Hong Kong again for one last look, because we're due to take the train from here to Shanghai on 25th March.

Symphony of Lights

To start off your night-time entertainment you can't do much better than the Symphony of Lights, in which the buildings of Hong Kong Island put on a musical performance for spectators across on the waterfront in Kowloon. The buildings in Central District, which by day are sober structures housing the headquarters of international banks and electronics giants, reveal their alter egos at night as they power themselves up and you see that they are decked out from head to toe in neon with huge floodlights on their roofs.

The fifteen-minute show happens every evening at 20:00. The towers put on their very best performance, each one trying to be more sparkly and have more colours and ridiculous lighting effects than the others. The new International Finance Centre (IFC) towers don't join in with the whole neon thing—at first glance it seems that their architect rose above the pressure to make them flash and instead chose to bathe them in simple white light. But no, instead of neon they have powerful green lasers on their roofs, and it seems that they just can't resist joining in once the fun starts. After the climax of the show the buildings go back to normal as abruptly as they began, as if nothing had happened.

The assembled crowd couldn't help but applaud. The show was really good. Video below.

Buying Malarone in Hong Kong

We left the UK with enough Malarone (our chosen antimalarial) for three months. Malarone is fully licensed in the UK for short trips, but only licensed on a named patient basis (i.e. at the discretion of individual doctors) for periods of between 28 days and three months. So we felt pretty special to have been allowed as much as we had. However after 32 days in India and 27 in Thailand, Laos and Vietnam supplies were running a little low. The advice on malarial risk, both verbally from several health professionals and on the internet on various websites, is highly variable. On whether Goa is malarial, for example, sources we have seen have varied between stating that there is "no risk" of contracting malaria in Goa, to there is a "significant risk"—including the more serious (often fatal) strain of the disease. So our strategy has been to take the tablets and enjoy the peace of mind.

Our research suggested that Hong Kong, South Korea and Singapore are the only places in Asia where you can currently get Malarone. So our top priority for our first full day in Hong Kong was to contact the source we had found on the government's travel health service website. They say that they can supply "Atovaquone and Proguanil" (i.e. Malarone). After trying unsuccessfully to phone them we decided just to head over to their office and see what happened.

We got off the subway and quickly found the travel clinic. Normally you need an appointment but it was so quiet that the doctor was able to see us immediately. We explained where we were planning to travel next and that we would like some more Malarone and he was happy to prescribe it. We paid out 315 Hong Kong Dollars each (GBP 20.66 / USD 40.32) for the five minute consultation [Nice little earner! But we were out of other options] and HKD 1,070 each (GBP 70.17 / USD 136.96) for the pills, and within a couple of minutes we had two boxes each containing 29 one-a-day Malarone tablets.

If you've arrived on this blog because you're searching for Malarone in Hong Kong: here's how to get it. Take the MTR (subway) to Sham Shui Po (on the Tsuen Wan Line in northern Kownloon) and walk to Cheung Sha Wan Government Offices, 303 Cheung Sha Wan Road. Go to the first floor and ask for the Travel Clinic. They also apparently have an office in Wan Chai on the Hong Kong side, but we haven't tried it. The supplies we got appear to have come from Canada.

Hard landing in Hong Kong

Chungking Mansions [Enlarge]

Usually we don't like arriving into a new city at night, but after one look at Hong Kong we knew it didn't matter. Public transport and shops seem to be open all night, and as for the problem of not being able to find your way around the dark streets, Hong Kong has just one word for you: neon! It's amazing what a few tens of millions of gas-filled tubes can achieve.

Hong Kong's shiny new airport is on a shiny new island just off Lantau Island, a fair way out from the action. We caught the airport bus into town as it's the cheapest and simplest way of getting to our hostel. The bus had a multilingual commentary of where we were, along with a dot matrix display of the upcoming stops for good measure. It was impossible to get lost. We just listened for the announcement that we had reached Tsim Sha Tsui district, pressed the bell and got off.

Our hostel is one of ninety guesthouses in a building known as Chungking Mansions. The mansions are on the main thoroughfare through Kowloon, Nathan Road, and are easy to find—just look for the most dilapidated, enormous block of early 1960s concrete that you can see. Then check for a ridiculous number of touts on the street trying to persuade you to stay at their hostel, and go on in. We had booked a room at the Oriental Pearl Hostel on Hostelworld. We had no illusions that it was going to be glamorous or luxurious, but we had chosen it because it had good reviews, and its description on Hostelworld promised that it would be spotlessly clean and spacious, with extra large beds.

We had discovered when trying to book it that there is no really cheap accommodation in Hong Kong. The most basic ensuite hostel room will cost you at least twenty pounds (40 USD) per night; a cheap hotel room will be at least twice that price. Once we booked the room, we got an email back from the hostel to say that we could have a ten percent discount if we paid for the whole seven days in advance through PayPal. This was a bit ominous—they already had a guarantee against no-shows from Hostelworld, so why were they so keen for us to pay the whole lot before seeing the room? We chose not to take advantage of the discount and when we turned up at around midnight we said we would pay for the first night only, then pay the rest the following day. They weren't keen.

We were shown to our room. Reception is in A block, floor three. The room was in E block, floor eleven. Having queued to get into the tiny, slow elevator up to floor three we now had to wait for it again, go back down to the ground floor, walk through a labyrinth of shops and touts and shady corners and general dodgy dealings to the base of E block, queue for the elevator again and take the long ride up to the eleventh floor. Then we found out why they had wanted our money upfront. The room was big enough for two small beds, but there was not enough room to walk around them. The TV was mounted on the wall because there was nowhere else for it to be. The fridge was full of mould. The bathroom was the size of a small shower cubicle. To have a shower your best bet was to sit on the toilet. The room was filthy, as was the bathroom. The view from the window was of a similarly disgusting tower (another part of Chungking Mansions) a few metres away. We found out later that we were lucky to have a window at all! On the plus side however, there was a network cable hanging from the ceiling. We attached it to the laptop and had another look at the Hostelworld website to see what we had been promised.

From the Oriental Pearl's own description on Hostelworld:

… As we see that almost guest rooms in Hong Kong are too small with tiny beds. We especially design spacious rooms with king size beds. We possess all the merits of other hostels, and at the same time, we guarantee an absolutely silent and new environment in every room we have. Rooms are designed according to the level of a 3-star hotel. Both the room and the size of the bed in our hostel is the largest among all hostels in Hong Kong … We have comfortable guest rooms equipped with coffee and tea making facilities, free local direct-line telephone, IDD, color television with in-house movie channel, cable and satellite television, individually controlled air-conditioning, mini refrigerator, hairdryers, 100Mbps high-speed internet access with wireless, mini sofa, clothes chests, reading desk, new 3-star hotel bed sheet and bath towel, bath tub, bath liquid, microwave. There is a self catering kitchen, a washing machine, water machine, 24 hours hot water for shower … We clean rooms and change the bed sheet every day, rooms are spotlessly clean. For the common bathrooms, the staff clean them nearly every an hour! All staff can speak fluent English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese language … Guest is provided with personal digital access key tag.

Sounds great, doesn't it? We have rewritten the above paragraph to reflect the true situation. See below.

… As we see that almost guest rooms in Hong Kong are too small with tiny beds. We give tiny beds too. We possess all the merits of other hostels, and at the same time, we guarantee an equally filthy environment in every room we have. Rooms are designed according to the level of a 1-star hotel. Both the room and the size of the bed in our hostel is as small as other hostels in Hong Kong … We have uncomfortable guest rooms equipped with coffee and tea making facilities, free local direct-line telephone, IDD, color television with in-house movie channel, cable and satellite television (poor selection of channels and bad reception), individually controlled air-conditioning, mouldy and dirty mini refrigerator, hairdryers, 100Mbps high-speed internet access with wireless, mini sofa, clothes chests, reading desk, new 3-star hotel bed sheet and bath towel, bath tub, bath liquid, microwave. There is a self catering kitchen, a washing machine, water machine, 24 hours hot water for shower if you switch on the heater in the corridor and wait fifteen minutes, and hope that nobody switches it off without you noticing… We clean rooms and change the bed sheet every day, rooms are spotlessly clean. For the common bathrooms, the staff clean them nearly every an hour! All staff can speak fluent English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese language … Guest is provided with key.

We called reception and after a while we got the manager to come to our room (it was gone midnight by now). We explained that we had not been expecting hotel quality accommodation, but that we had booked a room based on his description on Hostelworld and we expected him to supply a room which met this description. Unfortunately his grasp of English was very bad (all staff fluent in English, remember) and so we struggled to get across to him that his room was actually fine—better than many we have stayed in—but when we are told in advance that we will get something in return for our money, we want it.

His argument was that the description on the site was for his best room, and obviously we couldn't expect the standard rooms to have these features. We showed him the description, which clearly says "Room facilities and service", not "Deluxe room facilities and service", and we made it clear that we were going to get what he had promised us. After a lot of shouting from both sides he realised that we were not going to back down. He said that in the morning he would move us to a deluxe room for no extra cost. We agreed and let him go.

This morning he came to our room at 10:30 and took us to our new accommodation on the third floor, which is clean, large (for a hostel), has a street view, a bath, a wardrobe and a chair (which we guess is what the manager means by mini-sofa). At least now we can do the washing and hang it somewhere other than directly above the bed. For the money we are very happy, but that's because we're in a deluxe room having paid for a standard. We still have to run the gauntlet of touts to get into or out of the building—now that we don't have our luggage with us they can see that we don't need accommodation, so instead they're touting watches and handbags, and tailored suits. Do we look like we're in the market for a nice new suit?! And because we're on the third floor we can bypass the lifts and use the back stairs. Once we're fully inside or fully outside, it's fine. And we're loving Hong Kong already!

Incidentally, Chungking Mansions is so infamous it even has its own entry on Wikipedia.

Day 109
Hanoi to Hong Kong

This map shows the route we took in this post. Click it to see larger maps of our whole route at flickr.

Maps are taken from the CIA World Factbook.