Day 80: Yangon to Bangkok to Shenzhen

We left for the Yangon airport early the following morning. On the way, we passed under a yellow arch which had the words “Moving Toward a Modern Developed Nation” affixed on it. I couldn’t help but chuckle—sure, we were moving toward a modern, developed nation: our plane would soon be bound for Thailand.

Back in Bangkok, we met up with Kendyl’s Vancouver friends James and Darcy, and after dropping our things at a guesthouse we headed down to the river for some drinks while the king’s parade went by. It’s really incredible how much people love the king here. Actually, it borders on creepy.

That evening I said my goodbyes to Kendyl and headed back to the airport, where I caught my flight to Shenzhen—on the Chinese mainland, just across the river from Hong Kong. My end destination was Hong Kong, but I had no hope of reaching it that night, given that it was 11pm and all the trains and ferries had stopped running. So I decided to stay at the lone youth hostel in Shenzhen, and I did my best to direct my cab driver to it.

But that was not easy. I quickly realized that in China I would face a language barrier unlike any I’d seen before. People here do not speak English. And for the most part, they seem uninterested in learning. And they seem especially unwilling to wait as I try to pronounce some Mandarin phrase.

So I resorted to pointing to Chinese characters in my guidebook. The only problem is, I have no idea what those Chinese characters say. Do they give the youth hostel’s name? Do they give its street address? Do they give its neighborhood? All those items are listed in English, but the Chinese translation is only a few characters, so surely is only gives one of two pieces of information.

As it turned out, the Chinese characters likely gave the name of the neighborhood that the youth hostel was in, because when the cab driver reached that neighborhood, he stopped the car and let me out. By now it was midnight, and I was standing on the side of the road with no idea where I was going. I asked a couple of people for directions (I managed to pronounce the Chinese name for “youth hostel”), but no one seemed to have any idea where it was. I walked around for about half an hour but soon realized that this neighborhood was quite large, and so I resorted to flagging down taxis and saying the Chinese name for “youth hostel.” Eventually, one man’s eyes lit up, and he took me to the place. When I got there, I realized the problem—the youth hostel had moved. The first cab driver had taken me to its old location. I asked the woman at the desk when the hostel had moved, and she said two years ago. Thanks a lot, newly revised and updated Lonely Planet.