a day in china
With a friend from home just across the border in Shenzhen a day trip was called for. We planned to meet at Shekou, one of the closer parts to Hong Kong and accessible by a 1 hour ferry ride. Getting off the ferry at Shekou Port I was pretty blown away by the scale and modernity of the terminal, both the facilities inside and the building itself. Getting into China was actually quite a breeze with the Port Visa on arrival for the NZ passport allowing me to stay in Shenzhen region only for 5 days relatively simply and cheaply.
I met my friend and we headed to Sea World, which most native English speakers would assume is some kind of watery theme park. In reality it is an up market suburb centred around a huge entertainment complex! In the middle of it is an old cruise ship parked up in a meter of water, with a restaurant or two on board and restaurants packed into all other buildings surrounding it. There is an evening light show using water fountains right by the cruise ship and lots of seating around the edge so it seems in general this is how it got the name sea world. It was all quite weird, western and not at all how China looks in my head.
We wandered around a bit kind of marvelling at how strange it all was then headed for lunch, we had a very good vegetarian feast then decided to head for a hike. This was probably foolish considering the extreme humidity and poor air quality but we proceeded, stocking up on water on the way and plodding our way up countless stairs. We were in trees most of the way and starting to think we were never going to get high enough to see past the trees when we hit the top and had an awesome look out point, on a clear day this would be amazing, I suspect you could see back to Hong Kong and across most of Shenzhen, was pretty much 360 degree views.
After dragging ourselves back down the hill we found couches in a restaurant with fans, beer and sorbet and recovered for a couple of hours before I was back on the ferry home. Always good to hang with a mate from home and very interesting to check out this odd wee part of Shenzhen.
