Hong Kong - Arrival

We took the train from Guilin to Shenzhen which was the first Special Administrative Region (or SAR) set up by the Chinese government to try out this free market thing in a safe area, so that they can find out what works with a Chinese culture before rolling it out to the rest of the vast country. We heard that the food in Shenzhen is great, combining the best of the south's cooking with a proliferation of restaurants but we wern't going there for the food, we were going for another thing that Shenzhen is famous for - the border crossing into Hong Kong.

Now, as all good British citizens learnt in school, Hong Kong was a British colony until very recently when it was handed back to China. But ask any Chinese or Hong Kong citizen and Hong Kong is a separate country with its own laws, money and immigration control which we dutifuly went through and exited to - a metro station! Trains from here would take us directly into Hong Kong proper.

Hong Kong is one huge city, but unlike big Chinese cities people seem to wait for others to get off the train before boarding, we spotted a queue at a bus stop and the traffic stops when the green man is showing. Our hostel too, was unlike any we encountered anywhere in China. For twice the price, we got a room that was half the size with a miniscule toilet/sink/shower unit. We followed the directions to get to the hostel which turned out (as do most hostels in HK) to be in a big building with several hostels on various floors. The lifts go to either odd or even numbers and once on a floor, you can only select to go down. Though if noone else has pressed a down button you can actually go straight up. So to get from the hostel reception on the 9th floor to our room on the 14th floor we had to go down to the ground floor, since someone on the 5th floor wanted to go down, then back up to the 15th floor and then walk down the stairs to the 14th. Still with me? We were quite amused by this process. But there are English channels on TV and every possible store within spitting distance of our building which will make it very easy to replace all the travel essentials that we've (well, only me) managed to lose along the way.

Over the next few days we intend to enjoy some of the pleasures that Hong Kong is famous for - the dim sum, the skyline and the shopping. If you've been here before, please send us recommendations of your favourite HK top tips and we'll try to include them in the few days that we have here.