This is my Shenzhen kit: a set of immigrations to [bottom to top] enter China, leave China, and enter Hong Kong – that plus my passport and 6-month, multiple entry visa, of course… Costs a bit of money but enables you to save a lot of time and pages in you passport, as a single entry, 5-day visa is, like in Indonesia, a full-page sticker anyway…

You see, Shenzhen is just a stone’s throw away from Hong Kong, literally. Look at this map, you see the “Lowu Station” sign at the bottom? That’s the end station of the KCR East line, that goes from Tsim Sha Tsui to the border. There are two bridges, the one on the right is the one for pedestrians. You exit HK through the station terminal, cross the bridge – and set your mobile phone to roaming; whenever you see people back up on that bridge, you know they have realized they forgot to set it to roaming/call divert, and they go back within their HK mobile provider’s range – and enter China at the terminal just north of the bridge. Hong Kong residents just go through a metro-like gate with their chip-enabled ID. Us fuhreenas, it’s a little more complex. So to save time, I always prepare all forms in advance, which is this much time saved in lines… When leaving Shenzhen, you also need to present a form, which is a bit odd, but whatever, they be the Boss™, and the line can be long. So whenever I leave Shenzhen, I stock up on these cards too. Next is HK, where again the line can be long, albeit shorter than the one for Mainland “cousins”… I have even seen once a Hong Kong couple with foreign passports who apparently go back and forth all the time: they asked the immigration officer for a bunch of forms!
The last ingredient in the kit, not apparent here, is a wad of Chinese yuan, usually procured via friends in Shenzhen who need HK$. This is usually stored in my cross-Asian travel kit, where I have anywhere from 5 to 10 currencies.

So every time I go to Shenzhen from Hong Kong, I get 5 stamps, which tends to consume passport pages at a terrifying rate: one for leaving HK, one each for entering and leaving SZ, and two for entering HK [entry stamp plus entry status and length/ Visitor:90 days]. This will change when I get a resident visa, hopefully…

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 7:48 pm and is filed under Brain fart of the day, Sino-centric stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.