Hong Kong to ISCB-Asia/SCCG 2012

Notes on going from Hong Kong to ISCB-Asia/SCCG 2012

Caveat! I have only visited Shenzhen a few times and am not an expert on the subject of travel in that region. The following notes may be useful but are definitely not authoritative!

It seems there many ways to cross into Shenzhen, but I think three are enough to consider for crossing from the Hong Kong airport to our conference site at the King Key Palace Hotel (大梅沙京基海湾大酒店) in the Dameisha (大梅沙) beach area. The King Key Palace hotel is only a 3-minute walk from the Pataya Hotel 芭提雅, so these notes apply to participants staying at the Pataya as well. The three relevant crossings are:

Lok Ma Chau 落馬洲. Corresponding to "Huanggang" (皇崗,Huánggāng) on the mainland side. It is open 24 hours, so this is your option if you are going to leave the Hong Kong airport later than around 10PM. Otherwise I would take one of the other two options.
LoWu 羅湖. This is read Luohu (罗湖,Luóhú) in Mandarin. It is closer to the conference site than Lok Ma Chau/Huanggang. It seems it is open from 6:30 to midnight. It is a major crossing. I waited in line perhaps one hour each of the two times I used it. A taxi I hailed myself (when traveling returning to Hong Kong) from just in front of the King Key Palace Hotel to LoWu/Luohu cost me about 46RMB. As in many places in China, unofficial taxi drivers will offer you rides but it is best to avoid them (their cars just look like normal sedans, no taxi sign up top). Official taxis are safer and generally cheaper. LoWu/Luohu has an official taxi queue which is easy enough to find if you look for it after crossing border control into the mainland.
Sha Tau Kok 沙頭角. This is read Shatoujiao (沙头角,Shātóujiǎo) in Mandarin. This is the closest border crossing point to the conference site. It is small with short lines. A taxi from Sha Tau Kok to the King Key Palace hotel cost me about 35RMB. It seems people who frequently go between Hong Kong and the Dameisha area of Shenzhen probably use this one. This is open from 7AM to 10PM, so to use it your bus should leave the Hong Kong airport by 8PM at the latest. It does not have an official taxi stand, but you can hail a taxi yourself at the street just in front of the crossing. The drawback to this crossing is that it is small and not as many clueless foreigners use it. So for first time travelers it might be less stressful to use the LoWu/Luohu crossing.

My experience going to the King Key Palace Hotel via Sha Tau Kok

Just as a single data point/travel diary; here I describe my trip in November, 25 2012 from the Hong Kong airport to the King Key Palace Hotel.

My flight arrived around 15:15. Immediately after exiting customs there was a Hong Kong tourist help booth. I asked at the womaon there how to find buses to Shenzhen and she told me to go to Terminal T2. This was pretty easy to find (10 minutes walk perhaps, all inside) and I found signs to mainland (内地) travel.

I asked at the booth of the E & E (eternal east, 永東) bus company to go the King Key Palace at Dameisha. At first they thought I meant the Sheraton Dameisha Resort Hotel (which is in fact close to the King Key Palace, maybe 15 minutes walk) [later, I realized that the Sheraton's Chinese name also includes King Key (京基) the name of a major real estate development company which owns both hotels]. In any case, I showed the bus company people the full name of the King Key Palace hotel as listed in the conference web site (大梅沙京基海湾大酒店) and they told me to go to Sha Tou Kok (沙頭角). I got the impression from the E & E website (which I found through the conference web site page) that there are buses going directly from the HK airport to the hotel, but that seems to have been my misunderstanding. Perhaps it depends on the season, as December is definitely off-season for Dameisha.

The buses depart from numbered doors directly across from the counter of E & E and other bus companies. I was told to go to door #9 (I don't know if this is the same door all the time) and paid a woman from the bus company $100 HK. I think they probably would accept RMB, but I just happened to have some HK money on me. Perhaps I had bad luck, because I waited nearly an hour for the bus. When I got on the bus, I was surprised that it took kind of a long time (a bit less than an hour I think) to go from the airport to Sha Tou Kok. Most of that time was on the freeway, but at the end the bus travels on surface streets for some time. When we got to the end of Hong Kong they told us to get off the bus and leave our large luggage as is. This announcement was made only in Mandarin, although it was not really necessary to understand it as it would be easy to just follow others.

An aside, regarding the sample of bus riders I say. There were a few Japanese and Taiwanese on the bus, but most of the people I guessed were mainland Chinese. I was the only person who didn't look East Asian. I think that is because Sha Tou Kok seems to be only a minor border crossing point. However, I do expect the bus driver could deal with non-Chinese speaking passengers.

In any case, we got off the bus and waited in line for maybe 10-15 minutes to go through the Hong Kong custums. When I got through Hong Kong exit control there two buses from the same company, which could be confusing. Try to remember your bus, just in case. We then went a very short distance to the entrance to mainland China (I mean mainland politically, geographically the Hong Kong side is definitely part of the mainland). One thing I did which was useful was to ask for an arrival card (外国人入境卡) when I got in line (I did not see any on the tables). This line went quite fast and I was out in perhaps 10 minutes.

When I got through the border several men, hanging out there waiting for people to come out of border control, offered me a ride to Dameisha (they correctly guessed my destination). But I was not sure that they were official taxi's (and it seems there were not). I have ridden in such non-official taxis in China on various occasions and never suffered more than being overcharged a bit -- but I have been told they are potentially dangerous. So I walked past them and looked for an official taxi stand but there is none. Fortunately I was able to pick up a taxi quite quickly from the street in from of the building holding customs. Driving from Sha Tou Kok to the Kingkey palace involved getting on the freeway again but did not take very long. The fare was 35 RMB (the meter price plus a fixed 3 RMB fuel charge fee which I think is legitimate).

I checked in at 18:09, which was probably about 3 hours from when I stepped off the airplane. Perhaps 2.5 hours from when I got out of the initial customs at the Hong Kong airport.

My experience going back to the Hong Kong airport via Sha Tau Kok

I left the Dameisha area by taxi at about 10:45. At my request the people at the King Key Palace hotel called the E & E (永東) bus company and "learned" that there is one bus leaving Sha Tau Kok for the Hong Kong airport every hour. We intended to take the 11:30 bus and that gave us time to have the taxi driver stop and give us a chance to gawk at the Minsk and still make it in time for the 11:30 bus. Except the people at passport control told us there was no bus available and it would take us 4 hours to wait for one. Hard to say how reliable that information was. Strangely, there were only a few people crossing there at Sha Tau Kok. It was Saturday and the weather was great. My theory is that the bus company diverted the buses that normally go from Sha Tau Kok to pick up more customers at another crossing. In any case we waited around outside the crossing (on the mainland side) for quite a while until someone from the bus company got us a small minivan for 900 RMB to take the three of us to the airport. So I guess Sha Tau Kok is risky. In retrospect we might have taken our chances with going through the mainlain passport control right away and trying to pick up a car in the no-mans land between the mainland and Hong Kong, since that is where we ended up boarding the minivan anyway. In any case we all caught our flights okay.

Paul Horton, Nov 30, 2012