The flight eventually took off at 1:10am, over an hour later than originally planned and so by the time we landed it was around 2am and the point of staying in a hotel near the airport shrunk. It shrunk even further when we had to board a mini bus upon exitting the plane and it seemed to skirt the entire airport and twenty minutes later we were still riding it.
By the time I managed to collect my luggage and find the airport hotel it was already gone half past two and so it was a complete shocker when the hotel night receptionist smiled sweetly at me and said that the cheapest room we had for the night was 800 CNY. Realising that that was more than double the cost of my flight and that I would be there a total of less than five hours I did try and haggle but he seemed quite firm and was not going to budge even a hundred. The good news was that he spoke great English, the bad news for me was that 800 was too much for so little time, all of it spend fast asleep, so I made the hard decision to spend my second overnight stint in an airport in China.
I found that ths airport was huge, the security guards took turns sleeping in the waiting areas while their buddies circling the building and that the only place open 24 hours was a tiny restaurant that was called the Kungfu and had large images of Bruce Lee as its main advertising logo.
I tried to doze a few times but the circling mosquitos seemed to find me wherever I chose to lay down. In the end I came up with the solution to cover my head with a t-shirt to avoid getting bitten while sleeping on my rucksack against a corner, which did indeed prevent them from biting my face but I forgot to double up my socks and so my upper ancles were bitten to high heaven and it occured to me that this was the other reason to have chosen the hotel was to get a proper heated and bug free hotel room.
A little after 4am I finally managed to fall asleep only to be rudely woken by the airport lights coming back on around 5:45am as the airline staff all came in preparing for a new day, getting breakfast and open up shops.
I made the mistake of going to a airport cafe for breakfast and spent more than the cost of a room elsewhere for a simple ham and two eggs plus a moccachino and I although other places around the world have got behind different varieties and brands of coffee and tea they are still a long way behind Europe when it comes to hot chocolate!
Unlike Guillin city, there were plenty of people here in the airport that spoke enough English to help me that worked in the restaurants, pity the information desks were not so similarly multilingual. It took me over an hour, three seperate information desks and two managers before they finally understood that I didnt want to fly to Hong Kong but simply get to the train station.
Eventually I was given a post it wrote with the directions written on it for the bus driver, had to wait at platform 6 for a bus that goes to the train terminal ( at a cost of CNY 20 ) and then another 50 minutes for the coach to reach the station.
There were are a few signs directing me to the ticket office and ultimately it was very easy to buy a ticket that went from here to Kowloon for 168 CNY, which then just needed trip up to the 4th floor before passing through immigration and then boarding. Unluckily I was sat opposite the fidgitting child who loved to move about, bash my legs at every available opportunity and make lots of high pitched screaming so even with ear plugs there was little to no chance of me getting a bit of kip before arrival.
The two hours flew past and so did customs at Hong Kong, which then allowed me to pick up some leaflets and feel a bit sick as there in plain view was a way to take a train direct from here to Shanghai, with me only yesterday night buying my non-refundable flight ticket. Doh, oh well, how was I to know that while China was as disorganised as a centipede trying to do up his shoe laces Hong Kong is as organised as a cheater on exam day with a copy of the answers in his back pocket.
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