This Fiona’s version of our holiday on Hainan Island and visiting Shenzen and Hong Kong.

After a very surreal week, I have finally landed in Hong Kong. The ‘free holiday’ turned out to be a bus trip with a bunch of old chinese people….. oooh the banter! Hainan island seems to be the Chinese equilvalent of Scunthorpe, and is reserved for Chinese tourists, and their cameras. We didn’t speak to another foreigner for 5 days! We spent 5 days on a bus, stopping roughly every half hour to look round a tourist sight; ‘cultural’ villiages, gardens, mountains, big stones, and on the one day Sophie and I wimped out and went to the beach, we missed a trip to the ‘end of the earth’…. gutted! All the places we went to see were really manufactured and, although interesting, it just felt a bit weird being in them. Most of the time we didn’t have a clue what we were looking at ‘though, as most of the information was in Chinese. We hotel hopped, and they were all pretty shabby, but the most memorable was one called caac…. and caac it was!

The people we were with on the trip didn’t speak any English, so every now and again (usually at dinner time when we were with our crew…. the oldest peeps in the group) they would start chatting away to us in Chinese. Now as we all know my Chinese is laughable so, as the confused look set in on my face and I uttered the words ‘ting bu dong’ (I don’t understand), the whole table would errupt into fits of giggles and they would spend the rest of the meal talking and pointing at us. That wasn’t much fun ….

As I mentioned, Hainan island is a massive tourist destination, and loads of people go there to relax and enjoy the sun. In order to do this, they have to wear the ‘Hainan outfit’. This consits of a crazy Hawaiian style shirt with matching shorts and hat. This outfit comes in an array of luminous colours, and is usually tastefully patterned with cartoon animals. Look out Paris, this is gonna be the next big fashion craze … I swear!

Last night we flew into Shenzhen, after finally ditching the group. We stayed there overnight and then crossed the border into Hong Kong this morning. Sent most of the day getting into the city centre and finding accomodaton, and we kind of accidentally on purpose ended up staying in the same hostel as the other girls ….. although we haven’t seen them yet, the manager assures us that two Scottish girls are already there.

Gonna be in Hong Kong for about a week, Bex arrives on Monday which will be ace, we’ll spend a couple of days sorting visas and then off we go to Vietnam! The city is cracking, totally different to the other parts of China I’ve been, and it has all of these British touches …. feels like home!