Sorry for the Group Email

After our ticket-buying fiasco in Xian, getting into Hong Kong was an enormous relief.

You see, the problem is that although I know I said “Guangzhou” to the woman in the ticket office, and although the front of the train said “Guangzhou” in Roman lettering, China always offers the possibility of everything being totally wrong.

When almost everything you want to read is in Chinese script, the chances of making a monumental gaffe go through the roof. What if there was another Guangzhou? What if I’d mispronounced it? What if we ended up in a tiny village in China, where the trains pass through once every two weeks? What if we had to make do with moving in with a travelling nomad family, learning Chinese and helping to plough?

That would have been quite cool, actually.

Still, it was better that we made it to the one, and luckily only, Guangzhou.

Guangzhou is about as near as you can get to Hong Kong from Xian. From Beijing there are regular, non-stop trains, but Xian offers connections to Guangzhou and that’s it.

We had a nightmare.

No-one – no-one at all – in Guangzhou’s central station spoke English. While this sounds like petty, English-man-abroad whinging, the fact is that both Beijing and Xian offered people who spoke functional English. You couldn’t have conversations about the weather or the latest George Clooney film with them, but they could tell you where you needed to be to get on your train.

In Guangzhou we tried three different people and a security guard. Finally, as we were about to make our way out of the station in search of a posh hotel (they always speak English), a kindly fellow pointed us at the entrance to the Guangzhou metro. Go in there, he said.

We didn’t know whether he meant to buy tickets, or if we needed to go somewhere else. Either way, we ducked in, and spent a frustrating few minutes gazing blankly at the ticket machines. Hong Kong, which we knew to be about two hours’ away, wasn’t on there. Of course it wasn’t. This was a map of the Guangzhou underground system.

Then, something that happened frequently in China happened to us. An impeccably-uniformed man (complete with the kind of hat you get on room-service staff at the Ritz) approached us. Did we need help, he asked?

We nearly cried. Yes, we did. We were trying to get to Hong Kong.

“Ah,” he said. “You need Guangzhou East.”

Guangzhou, it turns out, has two train stations. One handles most internal Chinese trains, the other will fire you out of the country to Hong Kong.

Then, he bade us to follow him to the ticket office, where we paid for two purple tokens. He showed us how to use them (you press them against a reader on the turnstile), and took great care to point out where we were going and where we needed to change.

Once we were on the train with our bags (which at this point weighed about 20kg each, thanks to containing, rather than us wearing, all of our bulky winter gear) on the floor, I thought about this. When was the last time, for instance, you saw a tourist on the Tube, looking hopelessly lost, receive unsolicited assistance from a Tube worker? I’ve never seen it. A crowd of weeping, desperate orphans clutching their last bag of M&Ms and a map of the Victoria line wouldn’t receive as much as a raised eyebrow from the cubicled workers of the Tube. By the time he had shown us how to use our purple tokens, I wouldn’t have been entirely surprised if the Guangzhou underground worker had followed us through the barrier, jumped on the next train and helped us carry our bags to the Guangzhou East ticket office.

(Guangzhou, incidentally, has a lovely, spotlessly clean underground system. So, in fact, does Beijing. You really should go to both and use them. The next time you visit the London Underground you’ll vomit with disgust.)

Guangzhou East was a revelation after Xian and Guangzhou central stations. It handles all of the foreigners heading to Hong Kong, so the signs were largely bilingual, as were the staff. We made it to the Hong Kong ticket office and were delighted to find that both of our tickets cost us exactly what we had left in our wallets. (China mainland uses the Yuan; Hong Kong uses the Hong Kong dollar. The currencies are worth almost exactly the same as each other, but you can’t use them interchangeably in Hong Kong.)

Thrilled with our good fortune, we found our way on to the next train. Conceivably, in fact, the last long-distance train we would be on for some time; after our irritatingly truncated stop in Hong Kong, we were climbing on to our first plane in over 3,000 miles, and flying to Bangkok.

Airports are always in English, aren’t they?

Dave’s favourite moment in Xian was actually a fat, short Canadian twenty-something explaining to a Chinese woman that he wasn’t afraid of being mugged because he was “too strong and too fast.” Hubris mixed with a heady blend of racial superiority. I’ve never wished a violent mugging on anyone quite so sincerely.

Tags: beijing, china, chinese script, conversations, english man, fiasco, george clooney, george clooney film, guangzhou metro, hong kong, nightmare, nomad family, plough, posh hotel, roman lettering, s central, security guard, ticket machines, ticket office, tiny village, weather, xian