Day 3: Guangzhou

We woke up at 7am not knowing where today was going to take us. After showers, Kris updated the blog while I went in search of breakfast. We then packed up and made our way on the underground to find a train to China. Just one stop before the station where we thought it best to catch a train, we bumped into Rick who is German but lives in USA and runs a business in China. We got chatting and he advised us to follow him seeing as he was going to the same place.

We therefore took the underground all the way to the border at Shenzhen. We walked quickly through the border crossing without any problems then boarded a train to Guangzhou. The train was fast, quiet, clean and comfortable and within an hour we were there. We went with Rick back to his offices where we went to lunch with his 8 colleagues. We dined with chop sticks on rice with chopped up eels, a fish with eyes that kept looking at us and various other delicious dishes.

We took the underground to the bus station which was relatively straight forward. Once we got to the front of the queue however, the lady did not speak English and unfortunately the only Chinese we have picked up so far is ‘exit’ which is a cactus symbol followed by a lorry symbol which was not going to help in this situation! We followed the direction of her vigorous pointing and found the international travel service sign on the front of a building. We went in and climbed the first 3 floors and found a restaurant, a hotel and a woman asleep on a desk who did not appreciate being woken up by two English tourists!

We decided to head back to the bus station where we found a different ticket office swarmed with Chinese with no orderly queue in sight. We barged our way with everyone else until a lady opened a separate counter and asked us where we wanted to go. After asking several strangers if they spoke English with nothing but a head shake in reply, she was like an angel coming to our rescue. She booked us on a bus leaving tonight at 9.30pm and told us it left from 180m up the road opposite the KFC. We went to check it out and it seemed legitimate but we will only be really happy once we are sat tight on the overnight 9hr bus to Yangshuo.

Having left our main backpacks at Rick’s office we made our way back to chill for a few hours until it was time to trek back across town with bags in tow. We have suddenly realised the difficulty of travelling in China with the language barrier and have realised just how easy we had it in Hong Kong.