In March 2003 I was asked to go and investigate some problems that a customer was experiencing in China.

This was my first trip to China, and it all seemed a bit “different” from any travel I had managed before. I had to get some injections to before travelling, and organise a VISA. Oh, and someone else told me that parts of the region I was visiting was having trouble with some kind of “cold-related” virus… little did I know that that would soon become known as SARS!

Anyway, I got my injections. I (guiltily) walked past the “Free Tibet” protesters outside the Chinese consulate in Edinburgh and got myself a visa. And I started planning my travel.

I was headed to the city of Dongguan in the province of Guangdong. This is in the special economic area of China, where economic liberalism was encouraged much earlier than the rest of the country. The journey was quite complex; I had to fly to Hong Kong, then get a bus to Dongguan.

An old hand in the office suggested I needed all my wits about me for the bus, and that I should not try to get the bus directly off a twenty hour flight. So I flew to Hong Kong and stayed in the airport hotel. There I had a delicious meal, but was warned not to open my bedroom window as we were in the middle of a tropical storm.

 

Next morning I went to the bus station and took the bus to Dongguan. The route took me up the hills and to the back of Hong Kong until we reached the border with China.

There, I had to get out of the nice new shiny bus that travelled through Hong Kong, and walk into the Passport Control building. I was checked, and then I went out to get my next bus. Not so new, nor so shiny.

Never mind, there were Portaloos available, and I was ready to use one. That was a bit of a culture shock – there was no pedestal, just a hole in the ground. I guess Chinese people develop really strong thigh muscles!

The bus journey continued, and we travelled through Shenzhen.

There I was swapped out of the bus and into a minibus. I got to the hotel, which was really plush – the only five star hotel in Dongguan at the time.

I went for a walk around the town, noting the DVD shop selling really cheap DVDs (with mis-spellings on the dust jackets) and also the remarkably high number of hairdressers. Residents of Dongguan must have really neat hair.

The next day I went to the customer site, and worked on the problem. There was a tea from my company already there, and we all went out for dinner in the evening. Some of the cuisine was a little more… blatant than I was used to.

Another day there, and it was time to come home. The bus journey was simpler, a single coach that took me all the way to the border and another from the border to the airport.

An uneventful flight home and my first trip to China was over.

Photographic Note

The pictures here were taken with my Fujifilm F1400Z digital camera.  1.3Mpixels of photographic goodness, great for its time and my introduction to digital photography.  The pictures haven’t been edited, they’re SOOC.  As you can see, many were taken through the window of a moving bus so the quality is not up to much.  But it’s still nice to look back at the trip.