you know how in the film 'In Brugues', Colin Farrell keeps saying "fuckin' Brugues"? Well replace Brugues with China and that's pretty much how we feel. I feel a bit bad as I'm sure it's a lovely place and there's loads of cool stuff to do, we've just had some pretty crap experiences and are really looking forward to leaving.
After my last post I woke Mike up off the floor, said goodbye to the girls and we wandered off to get an MTR train to the border. Then things started going a bit wrong, Mike was sick all over the floor of East Tsim Sha Tsui station. Just everywhere. That was pretty bad. We got on a train and then I was sick. Luckily into a plastic bag but still also pretty bad. Then we couldn't find where to return our octopus cards to so wer HKD100 out of pocket. But after getting all of that alcohol out of our systems we weren't feeling too bad. Once you leave Hong Kong and get into China everything changes a bit. From every single sign being written in English and everyone speaking English fluently, it becomes one or two signs and about one person in the whole station who speaks a tiny bit of English. Or maybe he just nodded at the right time as his directions were't much good. It is all just a bit more confusing and not as clean and sparkly as Hong Kong was. After about an hour of wondering around getting more and more down we found where we needed to buy train tickets from (outside of the station, how did we not work that out!), queued for 30 minutes to be told the tickets to Guilin were almost 100 pounds each. So that wasn't very good and we were a bit stuck. Lots of hassle later we decided to change out plans and abandon our already paid for hostel in Guilin and catch a train to Guangzhou. Which was relitavely easy so we nievely though our troubles were over and things were improving. Got off, queued for another age and realised that Chinese people (or maybe just the ones we met) don't have much of an idea of personal space and walk into us and each other a lot). Luckliy I had written down the names of some hostels in Guangzhou so we headed to a taxi rank. But no one spoke English. But it's ok cos we spell Chinese words phonetically, the way they say them, so if we just said the street name... but no that didn't work. So we showed them the written address. And that didn't work either. One taxi driver gave me he phone and i had to try and spell things down the line to a woman who barely spoke english and it was so painful I wanted to cry. This went on for longer than I want to remember, it was so bad and we were so tired and just wanted to sleep. In the end we gave up and walked into a posh hotel, thinking we would have to just pay a fortune and leave as soon as possible. In the hotel was a map, with the name of the road we had been trying to get to clearly written in the middle as it was the main road in the town. I may have cried a little bit at this point. Then we finally had some good luck and found out that this posh looking hotel (the Bay Yin City Hotel) was actually quite cheap, so we booked a room for 2 nights and went and collapsed in bed for the next 18 hours. The room was really nice and had free tea and toothbrushes and stuff like that.
Next afternoon we got up and went to find an internet cafe. I think we asked over 20 people but in the end we managed to find one and find out the train details to leave and get to Nanning where we can get into Vietnam. Did the same asking millions of people and managed to find an ATM. Then went and scarily easily managed to buy our train tickets. So in about 3 hours we're catching a sleeper to Nanning. hopefully. Had dinner in a wierd Chinese KFC for one pound ninety each and went to bed. So far those are our adventures in China, which is not very exciting at all. Apart from the both being sick in the railway station, that was pretty funny.
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