On Monday morning, Sarah and I met Samuel, our rep from Hong Kong. He would aide us throughout the trip with everything from translation and negotiations on press to getting through menus with no letters.
From the hotel, the three of us took a taxi to the bus station, a bus to the Hong Kong border, where we went through customs to exit Hong Kong, another bus across an undefined territory to the Chinese border, where we went through immigration to enter China, and finally a hired car to get to the printing plant in the Guangdong Province, 45 minutes outside of Shenzhen, China. In all, it took about two hours.
The taxi ride was uneventful enough. The bus trips were smooth, aside from the cacophony of snoring business men. It wasn't until we were tucked into the printer's hired minivan that I started to fear for my life. The fact that I was in a very foreign country didn't bother me, nor the idea that I was so far from home --- it was simply the lack of road rules that had me on edge. Not once did I see an octagonal red sign; and not once did our vehicle stop as we spilled from a side road onto a main thoroughfare.
To take a left, we would simply position ourselves perpendicular to three lanes of oncoming traffic with the hope that we'd make it across before being flattened by an oncoming fleet of tractor trailers.
Later, we heard tales of local drivers throwing their cars into reverse on the highway! If they missed their exit, some simply stopped and backed up - despite the 55+ mph oncoming traffic!
Had I not been strapped in, I would have been bouncing from one end of that van to the other.
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