Lost in Space: Part 1 In Days of Mold

With the nostalgia fest your life suddenly become as 50 hoves into view over the not terribly dim and distant horizon and you suddenly realize that every celebrity you ever knew while growing up is either dead or playing Mum-with-Alzheimers in a swansong soap role, the word “holiday” tends to be something look back on as much as look forward to.

Mold in 1966: It doesn't grow on you

Holidays for the Murray families in the late sixties and throughout the seventies were the expected mix of touring mannequin-ridden castles in North Wales, finding you dad saying “Yakky Da” to direction-providing locals as the ultimate source of backseat mirth and going to see Kelly’s Heroes for the third time because it was still raining in Plymouth.

Holidays for the mini-branch of the Murray family currently living in a 15-up, 1.5 across in Hong Kong’s Kennedy Town are slightly different and are conveniently divided into two categories – Big Holidays and Little Holidays. Now, admittedly, not much thinking went into this system of classification, but it does the job. “Big Holidays” are those time-zone crossing expeditions which see us spending extended periods of time queuing outside toilets in Dubai, before returning to Manchester just long enough to get sufficiently acclimatized to UK time before having to make the punishing “double-flip” back to the GMT +8 of Hong Kong.

The next Big Holiday, however sees us eschewing the UK – far too depressing these days with its feral youths prowling shopping centres where Age Concern shops fail to extract cash from those same consumers that ignored them when they were a Woolworths, a Zaaci or an MFI (admittedly a former MFI site would be a daunting prospect for 70 year-old-volunteers to stack with knick-knacks, Val Doonican biographies and the Shoes of the Dead, but they’re game old codgers with fuck all else to do, except smell of wee and invest in pink wafer biscuits for grandchildren who have to be bribed into visiting).

Instead, the next Big Holiday, visas and time off permitting, will be New Zealand and Australia. Part of our itinerary includes a visit to earthquake-hit Christchurch and a chance to catch up with old Aihua mate Ken Tod. Here I propose to wind him up by looking quizzically at the remains of the city’s cathedral and suggesting that the whole thing was an ‘insurance job’ and a bid to get New Zealand its first international headlines since the Return of the King wrap party in 2005.

As to Small Holidays, well we’re on our first ever Easter Break. Our Lord Jesus Christ, apparently, didn’t die for the sins of anyone on mainland China, so his untimely death and resurrection doesn’t merit any time off there – still that’s a cross they’ll have to bear. For Hong Kongers, with their aptitude for bagging any Bank Holiday going, Easter merits time off on Good Friday and Easter Monday and the brief appearance of Cadbury’s Cream Eggs at the Welcome supermarket on Queen’s Road West. I believe Hong Kong also has bank holidays for Tomb Cleaning Day, the end of the Opium Drug Wars (probably known as “OD Day”) and the 150^th anniversary of Hitler’s Bar mitzvah. Enlightened self-interest ensures that the veracity of these events is not checked out too thoroughly.

Bathroom unsuite

Our Small Easter Holiday has seen us “out-jet” (a new verb some American somewhere is undoubtedly even now inflicting on a bemused pre-Teen TEFL class) from Hong Kong and head West to Li Jiang in the Yunnan province. Whilst a Big Holiday in the 1970s seemed to involve three hours in the back of a Hillman Hunter travelling between the suburbs of Manchester and the outskirts of Mold, even a Little Holiday now involves a four hour flight. This is probably as true for the residents of Gatley as for the residents of Kennedy Town and reflects a change in vacational aspirations, a widening of international horizons and the belated realization that the guest houses of North Wales are more than a bit shit. Apologies to anybody who lives there – not because of my previous comment but because, in general, I think you got a bit of a raw deal in life. Sorry.

Now a word of advice for anyone living in Hong Kong, At some point in the future, when you are planning a holiday, especially one that involves staying somewhere on mainland China, someone will chip in with the suggestion that it’s “much cheaper flying from Shenzen”. At this point you should do two things – 1) Vow never go to on holiday with the person in question as he is clearly both a cheapskate and an idiot, 2) Book your flights from lovely Hong Kong airport.

Flashbacking (yep that’s another new colonially-inspired verb to add to your “Big Book of How to Sound Like a Twat Without Really Trying”) several months to the belated realization that a four-day holiday is looming and the lovely mainland-missing Mrs Murray says to me: “Why don’t we go somewhere in China?” “Hmm,” I say, “we could fly from Shenzen. It’s much cheaper.” And the Fuckwit of the Year Award goes to…

For those unfamiliar with the topography of points East, Shenzen is the mainland city next to Hong Kong. Before the handback, it grew rich as the gateway to China and it was – and maybe still is – the richest per capita city in the PRC. It is teasingly close to Hong Kong and under the “one country, two systems” policy it should be simplicity itself to access. Unfortunately the two systems in question seem to have all the inherent compatibility of, say, Origami and calculating the correct co-ordinates for catapulting sea-turtles at a Sunshine Coach.

The first challenge is reaching Shenzen Airport from Hong Kong. The options are legion – ferry, coach, train or, as a distinctly only-if-you-really-have-to last resort, taxi. We’re flying at 2.15. Ferrywise, this leaves us with two options – 9.15 (arrive 10.45 am, sit on arses for four hours in Shenzen airport) 11.15 (probably arrive 1.58 in blind panic due to violation of international shipping lanes by three visa-less Filipinos on a raft of pirate I-pad packaging heading to small cove off Stanley to begin a new life). Then there’s the train/subway combo which involves hawking luggage between four different interchanges – not easy when you’ve got pneumonia (well-ish), a metal pin in your left ankle, an aversion to stairs and, above all, an ability to be instantly irritated by anyone I have to share public transport with, regardless of race, age or their inability to meet their individual personal hygiene challenges. Next up, there’s the coach, which despite assurances to the contrary the night before, had completely sold out by 8.am the following morning. This leaves the taxi.

Shenzen, sir? Certainly

Taxi drivers on Hong Kong island don’t even like taking the tunnel to Kowloon (the mainland attached bit of territory that also forms part of greater Hong Kong and for local cabbies constitutes the same as “Sale Moor? At this time of night?” for Mantax). Asking them to drive you to Shenzen is greeted with the same enthusiasm as asking them to take a ketamine test, though with much less chance of securing a positive result. 

We finally flag down a cabbie and attempt to bundle our luggage aboard before he has chance to properly ascertain our final destination, We then go through the usual pantomime  - he’s never heard of Shenzen and doesn’t know where it is (a lie), he hasn’t got the proper paperwork and licence to go anywhere that that has a ‘zed’ in it (another lie), he’s not really a cabbie and found the vehicle by the roadside with the engine running and has stashed the footless corpse of the real driver in the boot (probably a lie). In the meantime, he has managed to sidle up to another taxi rank where, he explains, we will find his friend, a fellow cabbie who loves driving to Shenzen, knows a really good short cut and will probably take us for free as it is his birthday. Reluctantly, we clamber out, whereupon our original cabbie revs his engine and accelerates away, leaving us wondering what the Cantonese is for ‘suckers’ – we don’t know, but passing language teachers point to us and attempt to elicit the term from their charges.

Shenzen: Hong Kong's ugly mate when it's on the pull

The cabbies sat in the rank look at a us with a mixture of pity, contempt and a sort of feigned nonchalance, a mute assertion that whatever we are there for really has nothing to do with them. In their heart of hearts – should such items ever come into the possession of Hong Kong cabbies – they know that we want to go somewhere and they know that that somewhere has a “zed” in it. Quite brilliantly, my wife opts to approach the very last cabbie in the queue on the very sound basis that, with an hour and a half wait in from of him before he has any chance of securing a fare, he is the most likely to say yes. Similarly, as all the other cabbies know that he will be inevitably heading zedwards they are unlikely to object to us dispensing with the usual niceties of queue etiquette. Her thinking proves sound and we are soon on the road to Shenzen and, our driver assures us, we are being taken to one of the PRC custom points that is usually overlooked by those seeking to crossover to mainland China. What he doesn’t tell us is that this customs point is usually avoided because it is a Gatweay to Hell – or at least staffed by the same people who work there.

Boarding Soon: Gateway to Hell - Lost in Space Part II