An early morning in Shenzhen, some dumplings for breakfast, and a taxi to the ferry station began our trip to Hong Kong. Upon setting foot on the ferry, I reminded Tyler, “you’re leaving China for a long time man”. “But isn’t Hong Kong part of China?” he responded. Well, yeah, it’s “part” of China, but in reality, it’s nothing like China. An hour later on a fairly empty ferry and we were waiting in line to get our passports stamped, granting us entry into Hong Kong.

After getting into Hong Kong, we left the ferry station, into the attached building, which turned out to be a mall. That was convenient I guess, we found an ATM machine so that we could get some Hong Kong dollars, since they don’t even use the same money as mainland China does. We had two options to get to the place we were staying, take a taxi or take the metro. The only difficulty was we weren’t exactly sure where we were, and couldn’t find any sign of a metro station nearby. So we eventually conceded to taking a taxi. It took a few tries, but finally we found a driver who knew where we wanted to go. It wasn’t easily noticeable at first, but oh shit, these guys drive on the other side of the road! Clearly Britain had been here before. The driver happily took across the harbor to Kowloon (a section of HK) and the place we were staying. Chung King Mansion, was the name of the place. Sounds pretty swanky right? Hardly. It’s actually a huge converted “project” building that has more than a dozen “guesthouses” some licensed, some not. As soon as we got out of the taxi there were quite a few middle eastern and Indian guys trying to help us with our bags, and get us into their guesthouses. We declined and walked through the lines of restaurants, net bars, and people selling random crap, this place seemed pretty shady, and on first sight, scared me a little that we were even staying here. Finally we managed to find the only one, out of 12 or so elevators that went where we needed it to. Upon arriving on the 12th floor and getting our tiny and expensive room, I actually felt rather comfortable. Looking online the night before, I had read many good reviews, saying that this guesthouse was pretty respectable and not too expensive compared to some of the others in the building.

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