Thursday May 31 Leaving on a jet plane

This is our last day of trip to South-East Asia.  Our flight leaves just after midnight, so we have a whole day to do something, so we are going to visit Noah's Ark.  The theme park doesn't open until 10:00 a.m. so we have plenty of time to pack our bags and leave out a clean change of clothes for travelling, after showers of course.  The day gets hot and muggy here in Hong Kong at this time of year and we will need a change.

We grab some pastries on the run and get on the MTR and head for the end of the track.  From directions we had, we thought the park was at the end of the line, but it is actually at the end of another line with the word "west" attached to the station name.  Instead of Tsuen Wan, we should have headed for Tsuen Wan West, but no problem, there is a bus that makes a route past the park and we are soon on a 15 minute ride over bridges and underpasses and we get dumped off on the advice of other passengers.  No park in sight.  Another nice lady on her way to visit her mother, approaches us and asks what we are looking for.  "Oh, it's just this way.  I'll show you" and she did until we were on the right track.

Noah's Ark Park is an amazing replica of Noah's ark and has a hotel and hostel in the upper chambers and stands 5 storeys tall.  There are several theater rooms where they have exhibitions and 4-D showings depicting things like the flood, the crossing of the Red Sea and other scenarios.  There are many, many theme rooms and activities for children from 2 and up, based on archeology, paleontology, astronomy, biology, the human body, and live exhibits of weird frogs, lizards, insects, fish and birds.  It is an amazing concept with gardens and sculptured animals scattered throughout as if in their natural settings.  There are misted gardens and walking trails to a hilltop lookout.  It just happened that Matthew and I seemed to be the only ones who showed up and got tickets.  We got special treatment.  A few more people trickled in as it was a school day, but you can sure see how it is set up for educational purposes and hands-on activities from making and small replicas of the ark. What a fun day!

Then we headed back by fast ferry to Tsuen Wan West and headed for Festival Walk in Kowloon Tong for late lunch/early supper at Oliver's Super Sandwiches, a western style food restaurant.  It appeared to be very popular and we wolfed down down the clubhouse sandwiches with kiwi juice.

Back to the guest house, shower, pack and a brief visit with Gary and Eva Winsor who had been to Malaysia and China during our absence and arrived back the same day as we did.  They are PAOC missionaries here and are involved with outreach and Bible School training here in Hong Kong and SE Asia.

We made our own way to the airport with 3 changes on the subway, but arrived in good time to find our flight was delayed by an hour and 15 minutes, which actually turned out to be almost a 2 hour delay by the time we were boarded and off.  Matthew slept soundly for 8 hours and I think I managed a good 6.  The flight seemed to go by very quickly and almost 11 hours later we were landing in Vancouver 2 hours before we left Hong Kong.  Diane says you get a chance then to correct the mistakes you made earlier that day and live it over again and do it right.  The International Date Line presents some interesting scenarios.

Canada Customs and Immigration services is such a pleasure as the officers welcome you back, ask where you've been and all that.  Taking the shuttle to our hotel, Matthew was quite excited that he could read all the signs along the road and on businesses, then out of sheer habit, thanked the shuttle bus driver in Mandarin!  Haha!  That was funny.  The driver wasn't even Chinese, but from Pakistan or India.

A night of sleep and we will be in home territory tomorrow, happy to be united with our families and friends. It's been an awesome adventure, for sure.  Now to assimilate some of the valuable insights we gained.  Thanks for following our story.

My blog was actually shutdown and unavailable to me in China, then it was cancelled by Google for some irregular account activity, until I got to Vancouver and was able to upload my notes from my journal.  Sorry there was such a blank spot there for awhile, but sometimes things are out of your control.  Can't Facebook, You-tube or blog from China.  That's just the way it is.

Wednesday May 30 Hong Kong

We were up early this morning to get to the railway station by taxi and try to catch the 10 a.m. train.  We made it with enough time to get through Customs and Immigration since we were leaving Mainland China.  No problems and we arrived in Kowloon around noon.  Again, through immigration and customs and we were out of the bureaucratic maze.

Now we were on familiar ground and no problem getting on the MTR finding our way to the guest house where we dump our stuff and head for the downtown area to scare up some grub.  After wandering through the maze of skyscrapers, grabbing lunch, visiting the gigantic Apple store, taking the Star Ferry back to Kowloon, we head back to the guest house in the overcrowded MTR.

We had some serious laundry to take care of before packing for the trip home, so we were up til after midnight looking after that.  Laundry....someone has to do it!  First time we didn't do it by hand, but it took half an hour to figure out the laundry system here.  We got it done though.

Tuesday May 29 Guangzhou

Well, today is our 41st wedding anniversary and I get to call Diane both today and tomorrow to wish her a happy anniversary. Here it is May 29 and tomorrow it is May 29 in B.C.  You can only legitimately do that twice for the same date when you are on the other side of the world.  Kind of different because now you can't forget it for two days in a row!  My days are getting so mixed up!


We couldn't get together with J until 11 o'clock and had to check out of our hotel by noon, so we booked another night at the Elan Hotel quite close to the Guangzhou Railway Station.  We found out later we couldn't catch the train to Hung Hom from this station, but had to go the East Guangzhou Railway station.

J arrived promptly at 11 a.m. at our hotel room and after some introductions, we decided we would take the subway to China’s largest zoo with over 400 species of animals and 40,000 species of birds.  Matthew was pleased he got to see real live elephants, fed the giraffes, saw white tigers, golden tigers, rhinoceros, hippos, antelope, monkeys and so much more.  He talked a mile a minute with J who is shorter than Matthew.  It didn't work out for Matty to go to English class at the school which was disappointing.  But 8 hours with J was great as his English is very good and Matty took advantage of that.  It was a really good day.

Coming home on the subway was very crowded as subways usually are around 6.  Jimmy had an appointment at 8 p.m. so was not able to share an evening meal with us.  We said our farewells and then Matthew and I went looking for supper.  The first place we tried, the menu was in Russian, Mandarin and some English.  The pictures depicted large pupae of some insect, a variety of bugs and other things that didn’t look very appealing, plus donkey meat with fish smell(?).  There was nothing on the menu we were dying to eat so we left and found a more upper class restaurant.  We looked at the menu before going in and found a cheese-baked sweet potato and cowboy steak.  Well, the potato was very good, but the steak was a quarter inch thick and half bone and may have had 2 ounces of meat on it (4 bites).  Well, that was it for supper.  With two coca colas, it came to $175RMB, one of the more expensive meals we have had in China.  We’ll do better in Hung Hom tomorrow.  It’s the Cantonese name for Hong Kong.

Theconstant in and out of air-conditioned buildings has left me with a head cold and now I’ve lost my voice.  Great!  How will I make myself understood now?  Matthew will have to take over and he’s doing quite well with his Mandarin.  We got into one taxi and I began looking for icicles inside the vehicle.  It was cold!

Monday May 28 Guangzhou

The Beijing West Railway station is massive.  To enter the station from the street, we had to produce passports, tickets and put our luggage and backpacks through an xray scanner.  This station is so huge it reminds one very much of an airtport with 13 waiting rooms, and each waiting room has 4 or 5 gates to access the train platforms by escalators.  Our train has 17 cars with a posted capacity of 118 per car, but they also sell standing room only tickets once the seats are sold out.  People buy little folding chairs from the platform vendors so they can sit in the aisles.  That would be fine, except all through the trip train staff roll trolleys of food and drinks down the narrow aisles just like the flight attendants on a plane and people need to make room for them.  Seats are arranged with rows facing each other, two on one side of the aisle and three on the other.  10 people are in close contact for each section, but two white guys attracted enough attention to have people hanging over the seats and gawking at us.  Plus the aisle seats!  Conversation became interesting as we used our limited Mandarin and encouraged those around us to use English.  This is a 21 hour train ride and we will have a captive audience for most of it.  One fellow is a civil engineer who has been to Zambia, Uganda and Kenya.  He could speak English so we chatted.  Matthew struck up a conversation with a university grad and boldly went where others fear to go.  He dug out a "Jesus" tract in Chinese and shared it with the university student who comes from Inner Mongolia.  The student said he had a Christian instructor in university and was quite interested in the booklet…so were all the other people as it got handed around with lots of chatter going on.  I could just imagine the secret police waiting for us at the next stop for questioning.  No matter that Matthew had just heard Josephine’s story of being arrested for interrogation for proselytizing and doing missionary work

Because of the former discussion of being in Zambia and Uganda, someone asked what I did for work, so I had to tell the truth, that I am a pastor (no recognition of that word), a minister, a preacher, ok, a missionary.  Ahhh, now they understood.  So you travel around the world to tell people about Jesus?  Yes, I am a Jesus-person, a Christian.  One middle-aged lady smiled and stroked Matthew’s hair.  I didn’t know if that meant, poor boy, you don’t know what you’re in for, or if it was just that she was enamoured with this handsome young man.  I’ve had to fight off the 20 yr. old girls from claiming him for a boyfriend, but not someone in their 40’s!  Matthew has been a hit throughout the trip.  In case you're still wondering, everything turned out well in the end.  We snacked on extra food we had brought with us, but we did see some interesting foods.  You can buy small tubs of noodles to which you add hot water, much like we do in Canada, however, there are also dehydrated or preserved chicken feet or duck feet you can buy in packages to add to your noodle soup.  There are tin trays provided for one to put between their feet on the floor where you can spit out the chicken toe-nails and bones.  Yes, some interesting.

We arrived in Guangzhou (a modern city of 10 million) at 4 o’clock in the afternoon on Monday.  My cell phone time was used up texting Diane, so I will need to get it topped up again with more minutes so I can contact some 'friends' I’ve never met.  After 4 attempts we finally found a bank that would accept my debit card and also found a phone card to top up the minutes on the phone.  We contacted J (don't want to use his real name) and arranged to meet at 11 a.m. the next morning after his scheduled meeting.  As has been our habit, Matthew and I made a familiarization tour around some of the streets around the hotel.  After that train trip, we were glad to be horizontal in comfortable beds for the night.

Sunday May 27

Today, check out of the hotel was interesting and took an hour.  Every room that was checked out had to  be checked by hotel staff before finalizing the process.  We finally got on the bus with all our luggage and headed for the American Steak and Eggs Restaurant in the embassy district of Beijing.  Each embassy has a Chinese uniformed guard that takes his position very seriously.  They stand ramrod straight and they methodically swivel their heads from left to right and watch the street with keen interest.  It is almost a timed motion and looks almost robotic.  Once again, the directors we were supposed to meet and have breakfast with, called from another restaurant of the same name and we never did meet them.  They were going to try and meet the rest of the tream at the airport as they were checking in some 4 or 5 hours before flight time.  At this point, Matthew and I collected our bags from the bus and took a taxi to the 21st Century hotel and the adjacent theatre where the Beijing International Christian Fellowship meets and took in the English morning service.  We had to produce our passports at the door to enter.  Afterwards there was a welcome gathering for all the new people and we had a short stand-up reception where we met other first timers.  We met people from Zimbabwe and Nigeria and Korea.  Matty recognized a lady we had met and spoken with in the market and we introduced to her husband who had been a pastor in Brazil with a Baptist fellowship.  What a small world, even here in Beijing where there are about 18 million people in the city.  The suburbs and districts add even more to that number.

From the church, we caught a taxi to West Beijing Railway Station.  We had lunch at a McDonald’s there before finding our waiting room and getting settled in for the wait.