My world walk blog/ China Part 2/ blog #53
Sorry
for falling behind in this blog. I delayed because I missed three or
four days walking through Hong Kong and then the first week walking in
mainland China. Part of the delay for getting these updates up was
because I had hoped to write up the missing ones first but I never did.
It's a bit hard to motivate myself to write old stuff. I have the notes
so hopefully some day I will! They are based on my Facebook posts.
Twenty-one
kilometres to the ferry port and then I discovered that my ferry to
Taiwan is suspended until the following Tuesday due to high winds.
That's a five day wait. As I planned to take a few days off somewhere in
Taiwan to catch up on stuff I waited for it in Pingtan.
I
had an enjoyable time waiting in a nice hotel and playing my music and
having a great time! I'm also looking forward to the mouthwatering
prospect of watching my team, top of the Premiership... Liverpool take
on archrivals Man Utd on Sunday night. Shortly after the final whistle,
around 3 am I will walk the seven kilometres to the ferry port.
China
is the most difficult country I have ever travelled in. There are so
many challenges to getting even the most basic tasks done. For example
even the need for a VPN which unblocks blocked websites. I downloaded
several VPN's before I entered the country as occasionally they decide
not to work. When I get one going it sometimes crashes. Another issue is
that I mysteriously have a bad internet signal or no signal at all and
there is no point in calling the customer service as nobody speaks
English. Another reason why VPN's sometimes don't work is because of
that poor data signal. So as you see that's a catch-22 and when a VPN is
fully connected I'm told it drags the effective signal strength down
further.
So I went onto the ferry companies
website which is obviously in Chinese. I pressed the English translate
option and it's a mess! One thing I did pick up is that it doesn't
appear to be possible to book a foot passenger ticket online and someone
mentioned they may not accept foot passengers. Yet when I was out at
the port I was assured by two employees that its possible. I don't
believe in worrying about something that may not happen, so its back to
the music 
China is one of those places where one needs a lot of time, and of course patience and to be prepared for the unexpected.
Having
said that, I'm afraid that I do not agree with Chris De Burgh here
because for peace of mind if I could, I would pay for my ferry ride
before I got to the other side. This week my YouTube song of the week is
his classic: Don't Pay The Ferryman 
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