Finally our Chinese Visa's were approved! After 6+ hours at the Chinese embassy and multiple visits (we cover this in another blog) we could finally make the last ferry trip to Hong Kong island to pick them up. We then went snack shopping, and brought enough to make our good friends Nat & Dom proud! From experience buying food during transit can cost you big time. We then put on our big packs & smaller back packs & waddled 30 minutes to the international train terminal. We easily brought our tickets straight through to Guilin but were not really aware of what this would entail.
The first leg of the journey to Guangzhou was easy enough to find the gate & go through customs & our tickets put us in first class, I was more comfortable travelling than I had ever been before in my life! We got off in Guangzhou, China and faced a whole new world with limited to no english signs and no-one who could speak english. Very different to Hong Kong!
We had to catch 2 trams to connect us to the next train, both of which were on different levels in a HUGE, multi level transit station. Without blowing my own whistle, I am actually very happy with how calm we were & how well we managed to deal with the situation, whilst carrying 30kg's each on our back. We arrived at the departing gate with only 10 minutes to spare & were delighted to see we were about to board our first bullet train.
Whilst travelling from Guangzhou to Guillin we were able to test Toms Google translate app & 'decode' the chinese symbols until we had a rough idea what station we had to get out at. It works a charm! we still got off 1 station too early and asked a guard to check our tickets, who quickly shoo'd us back onto the train before it whizzed away.
W arrived in Guillin at 9pm, tired & sore from a big day of transit & carting our packs around (we have made big plans to get fit again, quickly) to face a taxi rank full of taxi drivers and not a drop of english. We had pre planned for this and taken photos of our hostel's location on google maps & had the address translated into chinese symbols as well. For some reason, they still had no idea where it was & we attracted a swarm of taxi drivers passing our phones around and asking us questions we couldn't answer. Thankfully a police officer who spoke a few tiny words of english, asked us if we had a contact number & he rung our hostel, who gave them the answers we could not.
After arriving at our hostel & paying our taxi driver a double fair for his troubles (the equivalent of $4.10AUD) we were absolutely thrilled to walk into one of the most relaxing rooms, our hostel common room. A fridge full of beer & wine, a pool table, comfy lounges & books, a barista station, beautiful chinese wall art & a ginger cat, I'm yet to befriend! After organising our room key ( we got to take our pick out of the available rooms) We brought cold beers to drink in a hot shower - A beautiful end to a very daunting day. Our room is about 4x the size of the one we had in Hong Kong for less than half the price, Its also worth mentioning Guilin looks gorgeous by night & were super keen to explore it tomorrow.I can already tell I am not going to want to leave this hostel or this old traditional town, it is way too cool!
- Alli
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