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British Mensa Travel Special Interest Group |
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Trains
or Boats or Planes? by Alan Giles Early in 2000 we took the opportunity to visit friends and relatives in Hong Kong and New Zealand. We found that the optimum mode of travel within each country was totally different and in this short article my aim is to detail what we found out. We arrived first in Hong Kong and luckily were picked up from the airport by our friends. The car journey from the new airport to the mainland is awe inspiring. Nature tamed by civil engineering - the airport is on an island whose mountainous original shape was cut flat, with the excess stone dumped in the sea to form the base for the runway. The road and express railway that run to Hong Kong island and the mainland sweep dramatically down into tunnels under the sea and then soar over cable-stay bridges reaching over other stretches of water. For much of the time we spent in HK our hosts were at work and we were left to our own devices. They live in the New Territories between the towns of Sha Tin and Tai Wai, where the standard housing is 35 storey tower blocks. Each tower block houses so many people that the ground floor contains a primary school and shops serving the tower occupants; every four tower blocks, there is a secondary school. Despite the height, these tower blocks do not look out of scale in the landscape - no building in Hong Kong is allowed to be taller than the surrounding hills - this just proves how hilly Hong Kong is. (To get an idea of how high the hills are, we recommend a ride on the Peak Tramway on Hong Kong island, which takes you to a viewpoint high above the city of Victoria.) There are smaller houses, our friends lived in a "Spanish Style" house, a three storey older building - of which you will see many in the New Territories. The standard plot size and layout is determined by the regulations governing the use of land given to residents who were at one stage moved out of previous homes - and given land in the New Territories as compensation. Within walking distance of our temporary home was Tai Wai station on the Kowloon-Canton-Railway (KCR). A modern high speed railway runs all the way from the Chinese border into Kowloon Central. Tickets can be bought at machines very easily. The railway is used so much by the large local population that trains runs very frequently and we never had to wait more than ten minutes. The simplest way to get to Hong Kong Island is to change at Mong Kok onto the Mass Transit Railway (the Hong Kong equivalent of the underground), but you have to buy another ticket and you may prefer to continue on the KCR to its terminus and walk to the Star Ferry terminal. There's a tourist information shop near the Star Ferry terminal where it's worth picking up your free map of Hong Kong which will show you railway lines and bus routes. The ferry is very cheap, about the equivalent of 20p when we were there, and much the most picturesque way to cross to and from Hong Kong island. To get to the far side of the island, to the market at Stanley or the harbour at Aberdeen for example, you have to use buses. Hong Kong buses have a very interesting fare system. When you get on the bus you will see a flip over card by the driver showing the fare - you put coins to this value into the receptacle in front of the driver and take your seat. There are no tickets, there is no change, there is no choice of fares - everyone pays to the terminus of that bus. This means that: You don't need ticket inspectors (everyone on the bus must have paid for a journey as far as it is going); Long distance buses leaving Victoria (the main town on Hong Kong island) don't get filled by people wanting to do short journeys (as they would have to pay the full long distance fare); But, the fare for a journey in one direction is often not the same as the fare for the same journey in the reverse direction (unless you are travelling all the way between two termini); You do need to get some change before starting to travel on the buses (we bought the odd postcard now and again, just to split a large note we'd got from a cash machine). The other method of transport we would recommend is the Airport Express railway. Our flight leaving Hong Kong left in the evening, and like many passengers we would have ended up carrying our luggage round with us, or doing multiple trips in and out of the centre, if we hadn't pre-booked in at one of the Airport Express rail stations - bought our rail tickets and handed over our luggage. We were then free to wander round Hong Kong island for one last time unencumbered by luggage. We wouldn't
recommend hiring a car - the drivers in Hong Kong know exactly where they
are going and how to get there in the fastest possible way, and have no
consideration for anyone who doesn't know what they are doing. Taxis are
fine, but you do need to know how to pronounce things in Cantonese as
the drivers don't all understand English that well. Trains are relatively infrequent - it's typical for there to be just one, possibly two trains a day to where you want to go. For example, there are two trains a day between Auckland and Wellington - one takes all day, the other takes all night. There are long distance buses, and if you want to go right up to the north of North Island to Cape Reinga we'd recommend a bus trip - but for the freedom to go when and where you want we decided that a hire car was best. The hire car we found was very cheap, about 13 pounds a day for a Daewoo Lanos three door. The only problem with it was lack of air-conditioning on some of the warmer days - but the ones with conditioning were rather more expensive, so we took it as one of the limitations of our budget. Petrol is cheap at about the equivalent of 33p per litre. The NZers drive on the left, but measure everything in kilometres. Driving is very relaxed, except perhaps in the centre of the big cities (Auckland, population 1.3 million; Christchurch population 350 000). Even there, driving is rather like driving in a UK city. Traffic lights change straight from red to green just like they do in Europe - and they do have one strange rule of the road, expressed as "always give way to traffic coming from the right". The effect of this rule is that if you are at a junction about to turn left and someone coming in the opposite direction wants to turn right into the same road you are turning into - THEY have right of way. Unless the road is wide enough to have two lanes in your direction and there is traffic going straight on which prevents the car turning right, in which case you may sneak off to the left while they are stuck. One effect of this is that in a two lane carriageway in town NZ drivers tend to stick in the right hand lane, as it is cars in the left lane which keep stopping to give way to oncoming traffic rather than cars in the right hand lane. The maximum speed limit throughout NZ, even on the thirty miles or so of motorway crossing Auckland, is 100 kilometres per hour (62.5 mph). Away from the major towns there are a lot of narrow roads and large numbers of single track bridges where traffic in one direction has to give way to traffic in the other direction (but as Scottish residents this is just like travelling on some of the narrower local roads). You also need to watch your road maps for "unsealed" roads. These are gravel tracks like you might get leading to a farm in the UK - the locals go like mad on them. We spotted one which would have shortened a journey by a few miles, went a few hundred yards on it at a gingerly 20 mph, then turned round and drove the long way round. Our hire car agreement specifically mentioned four such roads which we were banned from using in the car because they were considered too dangerous. Our best investment in NZ was a road atlas showing all the major routes giving road types and journey times. While travelling around we stayed mostly in Motels. We never had trouble just turning up and finding a bed for the night, we only once had any worries that we might not find somewhere. That was in Queenstown (a popular mountain and lake resort on South Island) where it was the third motel with a vacancy sign outside which actually had a suitable room - it was a Saturday night on a local bank holiday weekend. Even there it only cost us just over 30 pounds for a double room for the night. Some of the smaller towns didn't always have a large choice of places to stay, but they were often the quaintest and most interesting. One final point - internal air flights in New Zealand were a revelation - check-in time only half an hour before departure, no X-ray checks or body searches, just walk onto the plane and away you go. We would
heartily recommend anyone to visit either Hong Kong or New Zealand as
an independent traveller, both countries are well suited to personal First published in VISA issue 40 (spring 2001). |