Hong Kong was pretty uneventful for me. I only really stopped off here because it’s meant to be one of the easiest and quickest places to get a Chinese visa. So I booked in for three nights into a very dodgy hostel and went to work trying to get China to let me in.
There seem to be agents all over the city offering to get a Chinese visa for you. Even my dodgy hostel was in on the act but there was no way I’d be leaving my passport with those jokers. I looked up some place on the internet and wandered over to their office only to be told that as of April 15th, visa rules had changed. Well damn. The new rules mean that it’s no longer possible to get a visa for longer than 60 days and that I needed to supply them with a return plane ticket and a hotel voucher for my first night in China. Double damn.
Fortunately I hadn’t made any travel plans yet so my new master plan was to head to an internet cafe, book a one-way ticket to Beijing, buy another one-way ticket out of the country from the cheapest place possible, and make a hostel booking online. So off I went in search of an internet cafe. Do you think I could find one? Of course not. When I did, do you think it had a printer? Hell to the no.
So I wandered back to the visa office to explain my plight. Add to this that fact that it’s now bout 11:20am and I have to have my application in by noon to get my visa back by the next day. If I wasn’t staying in the worst hostel in the world I wouldn’t have minded spending an extra day in Hong Kong but I was pretty eager to get the hell out so getting that application in my noon became my mission.
The visa guy suggested a hotel down the road that might have internet and a printer and also suggested I head to the travel agent next door to see if they could help. I tried the travel agency firstand it seemed like they were used to helping people out with the new visa requirements. They told me that for about $250 I could have a return ticket to the cheapest place in China and a booking for a cheap hotel.
With that knowledge at hand and with time ticking steadily by I headed off in search of the hotel with that elusive printer. I got in the elevator, headed to the ground floor, thought that maybe I wouldn’t have time to go to the hotel so headed back up to the fifth floor, then thought that I would so headed down to the ground floor again, then I thought that the travel agency thing was a good deal, back up to the fifth floor, then I didn’t, back down, then I thought about asking them about a return flight to Beijing since I hadn’t yet bought one, back up. So after a comical display of indecision I was back in the travel agency buying a return ticket to Beijing and booking a hotel.
I got my application in with a few minutes to spare and in the end it only ended up costing my about $100 more than I would have paid had I done things myself online. This might seem like a lot but there were other people there who had already bought train tickets and were going to stay with friends so they had to shell out an extra $250 for the cheap plane and hotel combo. Pretty annoying.
So how is Hong Kong? Meh. It’s full of shopping malls. They do have this big display for the Olympics with giant mascots participating in each of the sporting events. The ones that are meant to be wrestling look like they’re shagging. It made me laugh every time I walked by.
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