Trip from Hong Kong into China
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Hong Kong,
Hong Kong,
China
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Once we got into Hong Kong we had to go through customs and then find a van company that will take us up into China. For those of you who don't know, Hong Kong is now back under that rule of China, but it's not actually considered to be "in China". It is it's own region and requires that you go through customs again, outside of the airport, when you are entering China. After walking around for a while we were able to come across a group of van companies and they were all yelling out names of cities and asking if we want a bus. We were looking for a company called E & E, but it was nowhere to be found. So we went up to the first kiosk that had a picture of a van on it. Finally stumbled through the language barrier and we were on a van into China.
The second trip through customs that I mentioned above was quite interesting. It is usually a seamless process but the picture in Liz's passport is quite old and she looked quite different at that point in her life than she does now. The woman at the booth said "This you?" as she is pointing to the picture. Liz said yes and the woman continued to look and then got another guy to get a closer look. He asked similar questions and asked for more ID to compare. Everything seemed to be going alright and the van moved forward and we were given back our passports. But wait, Liz doesn't have her passport. Next thing we know the van is pulling over and another guy comes up to the van to make sure we weren't trying to use a fake passport. He looked at her closely, asked for more ID. Asked her to re-sign her name (she had to sign it like she did when she was 16) and then she had to pull back her hair and finally he said "OK". So that was our first stressful part of the trip, but we made it.
From there we had to drop two other guys off at a hotel in a different town, which the driver really couldn't find and eventually we made it into the town of Qing Xi and to our hotel which is called the Sen Mei and it has the word California on the front of it.
