[Itinerary Page]The Daily Diary of a Wandering Restaurateur
April 22 - Hong Kong to Shenzhen to Beijing
This was a very long day -- a couple of hours from Seattle to San Francisco, a six-hour layover, then another 15 hours to Hong Kong! I will admit that business class on Singapore Airlines is a very nice way to travel ... but it is still a long trip! The good news is that we left San Francisco around 1am and got into Hong Kong around 5:30am, so it was dark the entire time and just felt like a particularly long night.
We were meeting my long-time colleague Marv Hunt and his Chinese wife, Miao, in Beijing so we still had miles to go. It was far less expensive to cross over into mainland China and fly from the city of Shenzhen than to fly from Hong Kong. The trick was getting to Shenzhen.
There is a bus and a boat that make the airport-to-airport connection. The boat sounded more interesting but apparently their terminal was inside the secure area and we missed it. We found the bus terminal but nobody was at any of the counters yet. By the time they showed up, there was only about five minutes before the next bus to Shenzhen left. The baggage space was completely filled, so we hefted the bags onto a couple of empty seats and rolled off into our Asian adventure.
After about half an hour of travel, we had to go through Immigration twice at the Hong Kong border -- first to exit Hong Kong and again to enter China itself. When we got to the airport it was another scramble. An official-looking man at the entrance asked for our boarding passes. We told him we still had to buy tickets. I should have been suspicious when he said the flight was leaving in less than half an hour and he would have to help us if we were to make it, but he grabbed a couple of our bags and took off across the huge lobby area with us dutifully following behind.
To shorten the whole story a lot, we did, in fact, make the flight but it was only after the plane took off that I had time to do a little mental calculation and realized I had paid about twice what I could have bought the tickets for online! I suppose something like that was bound to happen after 30+ hours in transit, but it still was embarrassing!
I was a bit nervous as our bags appeared to be no-shows in Beijing but they were the very last ones to roll up on the belt! Marv and Miao were waiting for us as we exited baggage claim and we were off! They had us set up at a Days Inn fairly close to the main points of interest in the city ... for all of $35 a night! It's good to have a friend who knows the town ... and the language!
An early dinner at the hotel -- uninspired but convenient -- and we crawled gratefully into bed for what would be about twelve hours of long-overdue sleep! Tomorrow we start our round of the obligatory tourist stops with a trip to the Forbidden City. From here on, I will let the photos do most of the talking.
© 2008 Restaurant Doctor