January 21, 2024
Day P3: Mad Scramble for the Bus
Yesterday night before going for food, I spent considerable time searching the internet for how to get a bus from Hong Kong to the Shenzhen Airport where my flight to Cambodia would depart from. These searches weren't turning up any leads.
Not wanting to gamble on this come game time, I tried to rehearse the drill ahead of time. I walked to where the bus was supposed to be near my shoebox hotel in Mongkok, but nothing was found. This was due to the incredibly convoluted street layout. It is basically in the triangular vortex where Nathan Road turns into Lai Chi Kok Road and all the surrounding side streets. I eventually found the area, and stumbled on a bus company from a competitor. They had a ticket direct to Shenzhen airport which I could figure out from my limited reading of Cantonese script.
I bought the ticket in advance then tried to memorize the route back while walking. This sort of worked, but I couldn't fully download it into my brain. Most likely this was due to exhaustion and only eating an egg sandwich all day. And that was before the alcohol which wasn't exactly helping with memory skills. GPS doesn't help much either in Hong Kong as you spend more time looking at the phone and figuring out where to go than actually moving. Plus while this happens, everyone else is familiar with the place and rushing in a direction where they know exactly how to get to their destination. Madness. Needless to say I wasn't confident I could pull this off the next day under time pressure.
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Waking up, the next day there was more business to attend to and this was going to set me back for time -- fully predicted. Once I got back to my shoebox it was 11:15am and the bus would leave in less than an hour. There was still lots of repacking and checking all my stuff, not to mention lugging out the bike.
Overlaying all this rush was an extreme weekend in Hong Kong where many things happened at once. If I could be three people at once, I would have each person do the following:
Person A: the same as what I'm doing now
Person B: running the Hong Kong marathon
Person C: attending the international job fair and looking for new jobs outside of China
It was just lack of planning that made the other options impossible at this time. I didn't even know about the marathon and the job fair until this weekend. Well what I can say -- next year.
While getting more and more frazzled, I realized my cell phone was left inside the shoebox room. I asked the guards if they could watch my bike and non-valuable stuff then I raced up all 26 flights of stairs (forget waiting for the lift) to re-enter the room and get the phone. Phew! This was a warning to slow down, but this weekend was proof that I was just as much a victim of the rat race as anyone else.
I thanked the guards then realized it would be a race against time to catch the bus. Biking was not an option in the thick of Mongkok so I had to push the bike on the sidewalk. Then this crazy obstacle course threw at me an overpass where you have to cross with an elevator on both ends. It was packed so I just said fuck it and took the bike up the escalator and down the stairs the other side despite signs saying you can't.
Next, you can almost predict this: my memory failed me from yesterday. It was apparent that I was not retracing the route to the bus correctly. It took a lot of trial and error, just plain luck, and many turns to finally figure it out. Once I saw the bus I folded the bike and got on with less than two minutes to spare. Exactly like my last trip in July.
At that point the pace of the trip finally slowed down. Buses had to be changed at the Shenzhen Bay checkpoint. Crossing the border was painless for me but they had detained a Russian who was quite rude to the officers. He had snatched back his passport prematurely and demanded, "Can I take this?" They questioned him about his job. He said "I help transport materials from China to Russia on the railway"
Well that was a statement and a half from this guy. Not everyone might know this but Ukranian saboteurs blew up a train within Russia that traverses the Severomusky tunnel. Certain "materials" from China and North Korea use this route and are having a difficult time making it to the front lines due to this disruption. I don't mean to judge but this man, his build, his demeanor, and his story looked like he might be complicit in such logistics. But there's no way we'll know.
Next was changing buses and arriving at the Shenzhen airport well in advance. All this rush seemed pointless because I got to the airport five hours early. How's that for hurry up and wait. A better option would have simply been to take one of many buses to the border and then a taxi to the Shenzhen airport. But it didn't matter now, I could chill out in the airport.
Making use of the time, I spent over an hour repacking luggage. The goal was to stuff one pannier with enough weight to throw in the folding bike bag and make the total exactly equal to the weight limit. Then, the remaining pannier would be lighter and also have zero hassles going through security and hand carried onto the plane.
I made sure to put the duty free rum inside the checked luggage. I wasn't sure if this would work, after all the tactic failed in Guangzhou. But here, they accepted it on oversize and gave me a thumbs up. The whole thing ended up being 23kg, exactly the weight limit.
Since I'm a physics teacher, this whole exercise presented a very practical application: how to wrap up a fragile bottle of alcohol with soft clothes and other padding inside a pannier so it could absorb shock damage. I did a marvelous job and then tested my work by dropping the pannier multiple times from high up onto the ground. People looked at me like I was crazy, but the job was successful and the alcohol bottle was protected. Then it was time to head through security myself without a hitch.
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