A Return to China to Travel in Shenzhen

Now that we had ended our trip here in Vietnam, we had made plans to travel in Shenzhen, China. To be honest, after traveling through there for a month about 6 months earlier, I hadn’t originally planned on going back. After close to five months in Asia I was really looking forward to getting away from rice and noodles for breakfast and heading onward to Australia but my plans had changed. My friend I’ve been traveling with through SE Asia up to this point was looking to travel into South China for work and I decided to go along for the ride.

Leaving the terraced hills of Sapa on our way to Hanoi

We left from Sapa to begin a crazy 36 hours worth of travel going from a mini bus to a train in which all sleeper cabins were filled up so we had to try and sit on a hard wooden seat on the train for 10 hours and attempt sleep. No luck sleeping for me. Then we tried to take a bus to the airport once getting into Hanoi at 4:30AM but we had to wait around for a few hours since our flight wasn’t until about 10AM.

One last overlook near Sapa on the drive to the train station.

And just so you know, there isn’t a whole lot going on in Hanoi at 4:30 in the morning! We had to wait till 7AM just to find a restaurant that was open for breakfast. Later, we finally caught a bus destined for the airport but after being on it almost 45 minutes, we realized we were going to miss our flight based on the roundabout route it was driving. We jumped off, hailed a cab in the middle of the interstate then told the driver to book it to the airport.

Wow, 50 Cents has quite a reach here in Vietnam

We had less than 90 minutes before it was taking off and we still had to go through border patrol for an international flight to China. After twenty minutes in the cab and narrowly missing head on collisions in route, we eventually made it and got on our plane just in time. By the time we got on this two hour flight, I realized I hadn’t gotten but about one hour’s worth of sleep in the past 36 hours since the train ride was so grueling.

Once we arrived into Hong Kong, I realized just how different and modern things were from mainland China were I had traveled in the past. After exchanging our Vietnamese ‘Dong’ for Hong Kong Dollars, we hoped on the first bus we could get that was destined for the China border. And because of the British 99 year rule over Hong Kong, you’ll find many similarities in transportation that you also find in London like the double decker bus. When the doors opened to the bus, we ran to the top floor and grabbed the seats at the very front of the bus. If you’ve never ridden a double decker on top at the front, give it a try. Since you are actually closer at the front than the driver down below, you feel like you are driving the bus and the cars down below look like kid toys.

Crossing the from the island in Hong Kong to the mainland

The route that took us from the airport to the China border to travel to Shenzhen was a fun ride. We crossed over at least two bridges major bridges and from how modern they looked it was obvious they’d been built very recently. Once we arrived to the border of Shenzhen, China, I realized just how close Shenzhen is to the coast. It is similar to that of Hong Kong but sits farther back. Mainly the bay that it sits in is used more as a port for exporting and importing than it would be for beaches and leisure. However I later found out there is a section of Shenzhen that does have ‘beaches’ which is in the Bao’an district. We ended up breezing through the border patrol since there was hardly a line and they have really learned how to speed things by getting people through the border quickly since so many travel to Shenzhen then to Hong Kong and vice versa.

For a ‘short’ or brief history on Shenzhen, the city has just that, a very short history. It was nothing but a small town back in the 1970’s and had a population between 200-350 thousand. So after seeing the economic success of Hong Kong, China decided to make Shenzhen a “Special Economic Zone” and started investing in the infrastructure of the city back in the late 70’s and early 80’s. Today, there are an estimated 13-14 million people now living in Shenzhen and today, it has been named one of the fastest growing cities in the world. This of course was part of the reason we wanted to come here to check things out.

The electronics district in Shenzhen

There is a lot of economic ‘spillover’ from Hong Kong when it comes to the speed of progress and opportunities in this city and skyscrapers are popping up everywhere. There are many foreign companies here too with the most famous being Apple products which produces the MacBook here among other things.

Once we arrived into the main city, we were on a hunt to meet a friend through Couchsurfing that was allowing us to stay through the weekend. Since Shenzhen really doesn’t draw the amount of tourists that you would find in places like Shanghai and Hong Kong, there really aren’t small affordable guesthouses or hostels like you would find in larger, more touristy cities. So it was either stay in an expensive hotel or find a friend to stay with. This worked out great too as he was able to show us around the city and he was Chinese too so this smoothed over the language barrier for us, at least for our first weekend in the city. I’ll get to that later…

We stayed in his apartment which was in the ‘Futian’ district of Shenzhen. There are five districts, similar to the five in New York City, and Futian sits in the middle of the city, similar to how Manhattan is located within New York. Since we arrived late that night to meet, we just grabbed dinner at a Bruce Lee ‘Kung Fu’ themed restaurant (awesome) then went back to his place to work on useful ‘Chinese’ phrases. That was interesting….

The next day was spent trying to get a cell phone and Chinese sim card. We went to what is known as the “electronics market” which is made up of hundreds of retailers and wholesalers selling everything from DVD players and computers down to the smallest chips and computer parts you would ever need. In other words, if you wanted to build your own camera or computer from scratch, there would be nothing you couldn’t find here to make that happen.

Entrance to OCT park…Not quite the Chicago ‘Bean’ but close…

From here we went to a large park by the sea called OCT which stands for “Overseas China Town”. Don’t ask me why they would name a place ‘China Town’ in the middle of China but I actually saw the same thing when I was in Beijing so I guess its not too far from normal here. Anyway, we spend most of the afternoon there.

Sunset at OCT park

We left from there to go to a large (western) supermarket as we had planned on cooking dinner that night at his place for him and his friends.

Anyone need any noodles? There is a actually another whole separate aisle in addition to this one…

It ended up being a crazy cooking experience as the only way to cook over here is with a Wok. Most people don’t have ovens nor do they own flat skillets so you better figure out how to cook in a Wok. And dinner ended up being a mix of foods between Chinese and Russian with everything from rice, noodles and chicken wings to potato filled dumplings with a sweet mayo type sauce (good luck finding sour cream in China so that was the substitute). And there were 9 of us too and we were seated at a very small table; 7 Chinese along with my friend and I. Needless to say, dinner that night was an experience!

Saturday night dinner…

Only two or three spoke broken English and the other four, not a word. And when the Tsingtao beers were broken out, we quickly realized that you don’t just ‘Cheers’ when you first start drinking together. Oh no, you Cheers – with everyone at the table – EVERY TIME you drink even a sip of your drink. So even if you’re busy choking on a chicken wing bone, you still need to raise that glass and join in the drinking celebration. We literally toasted our glasses together at least 50 times in a two hour time span. Its the Chinese way I guess.

Cheers! Again! Cheers! Again! Cheers! Again!

The other highlight of dinner that night is the table etiquette of disposing of your uneaten (or rather ‘uneatable’) food. Since most meat in China is eaten with bones in it both large and small, the accepted etiquette at the table is just to spit out the bones right onto the table where the other food sits. Its not – Oh, let me just spit this into my napkin as I’m turned away from the table.. oh no, its – let me spit this from my mouth, right onto the table in front of me while everyone else is eating. It was downright awkward but an experience I’ll never forget.

The next day we decided to go apartment shopping. I really preferred to just stay in an ‘extended stay’ hotel but there were none to be found. My friend was really looking to work here in China and after a friend of hers had talked of the opportunities in Shenzhen for foreigners, she wanted to see the city and I was really just along for the ride at this point. So we were out with our new friend that day looking at a couple places for a temporary stay and found one that sparked our interest. It would be a couple more days before things would be finalized but we were only staying with him through the weekend so we ended up across town in quite a ‘shady’ area that Sunday night. If I told you that I had thought things were rough spending the night there, you wouldn’t believe what we were in for in the next couple days here including how I ended up being driven to ‘Wal-Mart’ in a police car at 10PM on a Tuesday night, but I’ll wait to tell that story in the next post….