(this happened on) 3rd November 2010, Trains
Flowers at a Hong Kong Street Stall
We woke up in time for breakfast but did not have the hotel breakfast which was a waste as it was in our hotel package.
So I went out foraging for a decent cappuccino, I could not find a Coffee Bean or Starbucks in the area, so settled for the Golden Arch’s and ordered two Egg McMuffins and two McCafe Cappuccinos instead. They were actually not bad.
We dumped our spare bags with the concierge and then paid the bill before heading out for lunch.
We stumbled across a local Vietnamese restaurant and decided a snack here would be nice.
We had:
- Vietnamese Pho noodles with beef, very nice but Tes could not manage more than ¼ of the bowl.
- Sweet and Sour Pork with rice, very nice.
Then, we jumped into a cab, which took us to Hung Hom Station on Kowloon in the usual break neck driving style which seems to be a must for all Hong Kong cab drivers.
The train station was very impressive, with shops and restaurants. We checked out where we had to go for the trains, and then noticed some travel agents. I was having trouble booking our train tickets from Beijing onwards, so we tried our luck and eventually found a place, which could book most of our remaining trip. We could not get the DeLuxe sleeper so opted for booking a whole 4 birth soft sleeper instead.
A quick coffee at Starbucks and we made our way to the train… I was surprised to see that we cleared passport control exiting Hong Kong, something we were not prepared for. What surprised us further is the we did not pass boarder control into Mainland China… perhaps this will happen upon arrival at Beijing.
The cabin on the train was great, two beds bunk style, a tiny bathroom with toilet and a nice comfy seat and table.
We had coffee in the very smart dining car and stayed on until around 5pm when we ordered dinner. This was quite amusing in it’s self, we had pictures, which was a help, but it was not obvious what the dishes were and we later found that they were often different to the pictures displayed. We ended up ordering come kind of Chicken and some sort of smoked pork with tofu and veggies, and a kind of Chinese ham omelet, this came with soup and rice which was all a bit too much. We found one menu where the names of some of the dishes were written on in English, but this did not help much as the descriptions were not clear. I identified some of the characters with my Mandarin book, so was able to recognize beef, or chicken etc. The meal was OK, if not rather fatty and too salty.
We traipsed back to the cabin around 6:30pm, it was dark and Tes collapsed on the lower bunk falling asleep. I read for a while, then decided my nice bottle of red wine and some goats cheese was a good idea. Around 8:30pm Tes sprang awake, drank the rest of her champagne, nibbled some cheese, and then we played 2 rounds of cards (one round to Tes, the other to me). Additional beers were purchased, music was played loud and then we crashed in our bunks at around 1am….
Very noisy people outside at 2am, Tes told them off and they apologized and disappeared.
G&T on the Train
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