I’m writing this 10 minutes before six in the morning, at a Starbucks at Hong Kong Airport. I barely had any sleep the past night—and I didn’t get much the night before either. Although groggy at the moment, I wanted to freshly encapsulate everything that happened and I had been feeling in the last 24 hours.
I booked a one-week Labor Day adventure to Hong Kong and Macau with my friend. We used points for the outbound and bought a promo ticket for the return, so the total initial cost for our trip wasn’t that bad. But as the trip went nearer, he had to cancel—and I recommended that he did too—because things weren’t going exactly as planned.
See, I’ve always had this policy not to book Hong Kong and Macau during Chinese holiday seasons—most especially Chinese New Year, Mid-Autumn Festival, Christmas, and the dreaded Golden Week. Accommodation prices soar, and with the sheer number of people, the cities aren’t enjoyable.
But with cheap flights opening up for Labor Day, I grabbed the opportunity—because, hey, Labor Day isn’t exactly a celebrated holiday, and this year, it awkwardly falls on a Tuesday. Hence, I went ahead and booked our tickets.
Busy traveling in Indonesia, I wasn’t really minding the trip until a couple of weeks before departure, when I started planning. As a travel blogger, I have partnerships with hotels, so I started contacting some hotels to host us over the weekend. I got several rejections due to high room occupancy.
I understood the hotels’ situation—since again, there was a holiday—so I was ready to pay for accommodations. I looked up hotels for our trip, and lo and behold, even the budget rooms at Chunking Mansion, which I actively avoid, were fetching about 4,000-5,000 PHP (~80-100 USD). Hostel beds were costing roughly 2,500-3,500 PHP (~50-70 USD) per bed too—much more expensive than the hostels we’d stayed at in the Nordic region! Mind you, on any other day, these budget rooms would only cost around 1,500-2,000 PHP (~30-40 USD), while a hostel bed would cost ~25 USD at most. Choices on AirBnB, which I also avoid, were also rather slim and expensive, so we did not bother.
I did some sleuthing, and I saw that China made April 28 (Saturday) a working day to switch with April 30 (Monday), making April 29-May 1 (Sunday-Tuesday) a three-day holiday. I was thinking that even as it were, Labor Day isn’t a significant enough holiday for the Chinese to go around traveling, right? Well, I forgot China is a communist country, so yes, it is.
Anyway, my solution was to stay in a city I had always wanted to go to—Shenzhen. Although immediately above Hong Kong, a Chinese visa is needed to enter it, since it is Mainland China, after all. It was already too late for me to process a full Chinese visa, so I explored the special five-day visa-on-arrival (VOA) for the region that most nationalities can avail of. I read at least three sources online that say that Filipinos may avail of the VOA or what they call “port visa,” so I went ahead planning the trip.
I checked accommodation prices, and they were a lot cheaper than Hong Kong, and even the big-name five-star hotels had affordable rates.
I tried my darned best to look for hotels in Hong Kong and Macau until the last minute, so my friend could still join the trip, as he didn’t want to take the risk of getting rejected for a Shenzhen visa. However, at that point, even a room in a dingy-looking hotel in Macau was priced at 7,000 PHP (140 USD). He withdrew from the trip altogether, while I continued planning.
Although I had no plans yet of where to go, I had my five-star accommodations arranged in Shenzhen, so for me, that was good enough. The day of my flight to Macau came, and so did my nightmare.
The moment I landed in Macau, I headed to the Taipa Ferry Terminal adjacent to the airport. As planned, I was going to take a ferry to Shekou to enter Shenzhen and subsequently avail of the visa-on-arrival.
I was able to successfully buy a ticket, but when I was checking into the ferry, the staff were looking for my visa. I confidently said I was getting a VOA. After a few minutes and a phone call, they said I couldn’t board the ferry.
Although dismayed by the outcome, I was still upbeat. The account of one Filipino blogger I read was based on his experience crossing the rail border in Lo Wu in Hong Kong, so after I was refunded, I got into a ferry going to Hong Kong. I figured maybe the VOA was only available in land borders.
Upon arriving in Hong Kong, I took the rail going to the Lo Wu border straddling the north of Hong Kong and the south of Shenzhen. It was relatively easy to cross the border, and indeed, there was a “port visa” office before entering Shenzhen.
As described in blogs, I did the process. I was called to the counter, and before I could even open my mouth and hand my passport, the officer said, “Philippines not allowed.” I was mortified momentarily, but I mustered enough courage to plead by saying I’ve already had Chinese visas before, and I had a hotel reservation. He wasn’t having any of it.
And thus began the process of “repatriating” myself back into Hong Kong. Long story short, it was a confusing process that ended in my departure from Hong Kong technically being cancelled. It left me hoping that none of it would ever appear in my clean travel record—and I was relieved that there wasn’t a remark nor a stamp on my passport.
I briefly considered getting a next-day visa through an agency in Hong Kong, but I saw that it costs almost 12,000 PHP (~240 USD)—which clearly wasn’t worth it. And besides, it was already a weekend with holidays coming up, so the earliest I would get my visa would be later the next week.
Left with no accommodations in Hong Kong for the night and the rest of the week, I frantically evaluated my options. I was flying a cheap promo ticket home, so rebooking my ticket for the same night was out of the question. I checked for new tickets online and went to the airport only to be faced with full flights and exorbitant airfares. The Cathay Pacific and Philippine Airlines desks at the airport were quoting me about 18,000-23,000 PHP (~360-460 USD) for an economy seat on a two-hour flight—and it wasn’t even for a confirmed seat; it was for standby.
The cheapest (but still relatively pricey) option was to go home from Macau late night the next day, which I didn’t mind.
But then I was confronted with the problem of looking for a place to stay in. I looked up online and saw that a hostel bed was selling for 3,500 PHP (~70 USD) at the minimum. I thought that was ridiculous, so I dialed up at least four hostels with availability (and it was already around 7:00 PM that time), and I was perplexed how they were quoting me the same price online. One Caucasian hostel owner even proudly told me that he was giving me a good price, since a hotel cost more than that—without him realizing how stupid his comparison was, of course.
Exhausted at that point, I bit the bullet and bought a more expensive ticket leaving Hong Kong the next morning. Plan was to camp out in the airport to avoid paying an unjust price to a hostel.
To pass the time and take my mind off the nightmare I had been experiencing, I went to Citygate Outlet near the airport, but I was miserable at that point that I couldn’t even look inside the shops nor enjoy my dinner.
And so I laid on the cold airport floor. Though I’ve done it before, my entire body was revolting against the situation—perhaps because I lacked sleep the night before, or most likely, I was just really upset by how things turned out.
There were so many practical lessons I learned over the last 24 hours—foremost being about Shenzhen visas and how the information online are unreliable, about how important labor day is in a communist country like China, and how hostels in Hong Kong gouging tourists on peak periods.
But I think the most valuable (and still practical) lesson to learn is to have a contingency plan and funds. I wouldn’t have been able to buy a ticket to go home, and I would’ve been stuck here without a place to sleep in if I couldn’t afford it. From now on, I’ll be saving up for situations like these that I hopefully wouldn’t have to ever encounter again.
Although somewhat traumatized by the events, I’ll get over this soon enough in time for my next adventure.
P.S. I took no photos from this traumatic trip.
Photo courtesy of Hong Kong Tourism Board.
