Sometimes you just have to pay
“How much?”, I do a double take at the menu and try to decide if my mental calculation can be correct. I’ve just walked across my sixth border in Asia and my second in as many days, 
and I’m starting to wonder if it was such a good idea.
I left Hanoi on board a typically packed Vietnamese minibus heading for the border town of Dong Dang, where I walked through the mountain friendship pass straight into the enormous building site that is 21st century China. The paint still looked wet on the walls of the huge and deserted new immigration building as I scribbled my details on the arrival card, and I walked across the mud through the Chinese arch that marked the end of the border zone wondering how the dirty old Vietnamese roads were going to cope with the traffic from the huge new motorway the Chinese seem to be building all the way to the frontier.
A taxi, a bus, an overnight stop in the city of Nanning, an overnight train to Guangzhou, a 90 minute local train to Shenzen and a ten minute walk has brought me finally over the heavily fortified border that is the Shenzen river. I’m tired and just want to sit down for ten minutes with a coffee and a pastry before I take yet another train; from the border to the city, but after 8 weeks in South East Asia paying the equivalent of two pounds for a coffee seems horrendous. In Thailand this could buy a room for the night; it would be five large bottles of Beer Lao or a decent meal in Hanoi.
Some hours later I’m watching the sun set over the city from Victoria Peak and I realise why I came here; there are no major iconic landmarks like Sydney or London but the skyline is strangely familiar, and as the skyscrapers begin to light up under the crimson sky I forget about my grubby overpriced room and the cost of beer. I’m in Hong Kong!
