Before I left Hong Kong for mainland China - a strange choice of wording considering much of Hong Kong is already on the mainland - I wanted to visit the Hong Kong Zoo. I had already tried to do so earlier in the week, but had followed the directions I had been given carefully and arrived instead at the island park and spent much of the morning exploring the large undercover aviary, assuming it to be part of the zoo. In fact, I should've continued further up the road past the Hong Kong Island park and the American Embassy where, in early 1997, I was astonished to find literally hundreds of residents lining up outside fighting with each other to get in to apply for a US visa. At the time, there really was something of a panic going on regarding the upcoming takeover of Hong Kong by the Chinese, and I think many people honestly pictured tanks swarming over the horizon as soon as the handover ceremony was over. I would imagine that the officials at the Embassy were slightly brighter than they were given credit for - after all, if hundreds of people suddenly turn up at your door asking for a visitors visa to your country five seconds before their own is handed over to a communist dictatorship, you probably need to ask yourself if any of them seriously plan on coming back!

I have to say that I wasn't overly impressed by the Hong Kong Zoological Gardens when I did eventually find them. For a start, whoever designed the place seemed to have a slightly more than healthy obsession with monkeys and apes, as there seem to be far more of them than any other animal - not really a hugely impressive choice, considering that it's hard to walk down the street in many parts of South East Asia without at least ten monkeys trying to steal your bags. Just in case you forget about the existence of apes for a moment, there are also statues dotted around the park to remind you that you should go back and have another look at all their hilarious antics: antics which generally involve apes throwing their own poo at each other at regular intervals. I was far more impressed by the Jaguar enclosure - assuming, for a moment, that I could put aside the fact that somebody had taken these magnificent animals out of their natural habitat and put them in a large cage instead - but slightly less impressed by the calibre of visitor to the exhibit. While I was standing, watching a Jaguar strolling proudly around its domain, a young woman appeared next to me with a small child. After a few moments staring at the cage and its occupant, she turned to her daughter and, in full earshot of several people who immediately choked on their lunch, said: "Well, you learn something new every day, don't you Melody? Mummy didn't even know they made Tigers in that colour..."

And so to China...

Getting into Mainland China is fairly easy since the hand-over of Hong Kong to the Chinese in '97. A trip on the MTR to Kowloon Tong station is followed by a quick change onto the overland KCR which whisks you through the New Territories to Lo Wu station on the border at Shenzhen. On the way, Hong Kong treats you to a last tantalising look at just how much more there is to it than you think as you stop at the most delightful country stations where school children, old Chinese ladies laden with exotic shopping, farmers and all sorts of other characters hop on and off on their way to who knows where.

At Lo Wu, the border into China seemed formal but friendly, veering slightly more towards the formal for those who happened to call China home. I had to join the queue of people filing slowly out of Hong Kong and have a departure stamp added to my passport, but then was required to go upstairs to a separate room and fill out an arrival form to enter the People's Republic. In between, I found myself in a sort of no mans land, neither in Hong Kong nor China, wondering what would happen if they didn't like the look of me and decided not to let me in... anyone seen the film Terminal?

As a visitor, my experience of Chinese customs and immigration was very different to that of the locals. Downstairs, a line of Chinese citizens stretched around the block, each individual filing slowly into the arrivals hall to be scrutinised heavily and suspiciously by various officials. China seemingly opens its arms wide to westerners who may be carrying the almighty dollar, but seems to care little for the idea of local people moving across the border. Leaving the train at Lo Wu, the sign to the arrival hall for foreigners was not very obvious and I actually spent a few minutes queuing up with the locals before a kindly old gentleman tapped me on the shoulder, waved his finger at me meaningfully and pointed me upstairs with a kind smile - so nobody seems to be bitter about this difference in the way they are treated here.

After passing through customs, I was herded straight out of the front doors into a huge plaza full of vendors selling plastic trinkets and taxi drivers waiting to take me to the delights of China - as long as I was willing to quickly learn the language first. China, as I was soon to discover, was one of the few places I'd ever travelled where absolutely nobody spoke a single word of English. Staring at me from across the road, however, was the Shangri-La hotel - and, although it looked as though it might well cost several opposable limbs to stay there for the night, I did suspect that the doorman might be the solution to the language barrier. Doormen deal with foreign visitors every day, I figured, so he might be able to hail a taxi and tell the driver where to take me. With this in mind I crossed the road, walked in one door and out the other, pretended I was staying at the hotel and pursuaded the doorman to flag me down a cab.

The taxi driver must have seen me coming, though, because as soon as I was inside we seemed to come to an arrangement whereby he would take me to Shenzhen and in return I would pay off a large chunk of his mortgage.

Finding a hotel in Shenzhen was an experience, to say the least. I had expected to get out of the taxi and find them everywhere as you would in any other major town or city, but instead, as it got later and there was still no sign of a hotel, I ended up wandering around the streets of Shenzhen putting my hands together and leaning my head on them in the traditional "going to sleep" gesture to everyone passing. If I was hoping to come across another of those kindly old gentlemen who would take pity on a stupid tourist and direct me to a hotel, I was mistaken - for some reason, everybody I met seemed to be in rather a hurry to get away from me! In the end, almost at the point of giving up and grabbing another extortionate ride back to the Shangri-La, I plonked myself down at a roadside cafe in despair - and this is where the gods finally took pity on me and decided to provide me with a waitress who spoke almost fluent English. I had to restrain myself from grabbing her and kissing her. In fact, I was so grateful that I seriously considered buying a burger from her but wisely thought better of it. From what I've seen, burgers in China tend to be a tad on the raw side, and as I could sense the saliva dripping from the fangs of the people lining up at the counter I decided to stick to a coke and directions to a hotel instead. My waitress even drew me a map of Shenzhen on a napkin, which was so incredibly detailed that I suspected she worked as a cartographer in her spare time, and it turned out that I had passed a huge hotel several times in my search but that it had been carefully pretending to be a building site - a hotels often are these days.

My abode for the night certainly wasn't the Shangri-La. In fact, I haven't felt quite so much as though I was staying at Fawlty Towers for a long time - the only thing missing was a view of Torquay from my bedroom window. Most of the building was covered in scaffolding, and my floor looked to be about the only one that had been in any way completed - but it was home. I was also able to ascertain from the size of the deposit the manager required for my room, that they needed to pay the builders that night. When I went out for a bite to eat later in the evening, the hotel also decided to change the English speaking girl on reception for an old lady who, upon my return, looked at me blankly while I tried to get my key back. I wrote the number of my room down on a piece of paper, I mimed putting a key in the door and turning it, I pointed up the stairs and then at the paper, but not even a flicker of comprehension ever crossed her face - I mean, what the hell did she think I was trying to tell her? Eventually, the manager turned up and muttered something to her in Chinese - and at this, the old lady handed over my key immediately and begun bowing profusely as though to say "Oh, The key to room 12. Why didn't you say so before?

During the night, my addled brain decided to treat me to my first ever lucid dream - you know, that weird s*** that sometimes happens just after your brain has switched off all control of your body but before it's quite got around to separating the conscious world from the dream state which is slowly taking over. I remember it quite clearly. I was lying in bed in my unfamiliar hotel room, drifting off to sleep, when suddenly the door in front of me was creaking open and a man with an axe was coming in to kill me - I was absolutely certain that I was awake, but I couldn't call out and my arms and legs refused to move. Eventually, the part of my brain which was trying to pull me into deep sleep lost to the part of me trying to wake up, and I found my newly active limbs flailing about all over the place. And the door wasn't even in front of me, so I couldn't have seen anyone coming in even if I'd wanted to. I didn't enjoy my first night in China. When people talk about lucid dreams, they usually go on about being convinced that they're floating around in a paradise garden with all of their deceased relatives or something - nobody ever mentions the axe wielding maniacs, do they?

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.