After riding just a few kilometers this morning I encountered another toll gate. Since I earlier decided to avoid any paid roads from then on and especially that here they wanted 20 Yuan I requested to be permitted to go back. I was not so I had to pay. Only about 15 kilometers further I ran into another tollgate where they wanted 45 Yuan!! I showed them the pay slip from the earlier toll gate in hope they would at least let me in without any payment now and I would get off at the earliest exit. There seemed to be no way how to get off the hook. I had to pay.

It was about 113 kilometers to Shenzhen so I was sure that I had just paid for the whole ride to Shenzhen on this highway so I decided to say on it. However, still 30 kilometers before the city I was running dangerously out of petrol, as there was no petrol station for the last 50 kilometers so I had to get off the highway then. To my outrage I had to pay another 55 Yuan!! at the exit tollgate. What kind of system is this!?!? You pay before and after and so the total I had paid at the end for about 110 kilometers was 130 Yuan! Almost 1.2 Yuan a kilometer, or from a different point of view USD 1.50 per each 10 kilometers!!! Is there any other country in the world where one would pay such outrageous amounts for roads? I sincerely doubt it. Compared to other costs of living it is even more unbelievable here.

Anyway, after being subsequently stopped by the police when I broke a traffic rule and released again as they could find nobody who could speak English to me and after driving through what seemed like several cities on the map but felt like one huge city – Shenzhen and after searching for the right way to Hong Kong for a couple of hours I finally arrived at a gate to the border buildings. I stopped to ask the policemen there if that was the way for me to go to HK and he sent me to a different crossing about 5 kilometers away.

At the second crossing the guys were trying hard to process me, making at least 30 phone calls, bringing more people for consultation and so my outlook was changing from “no way” to “maybe” then “wait some more”, “wait more again”, “maybe you can but wait some more, we have to confirm” and some more intermediate stages to the final “you can go into Hong Kong but you have to put your motorbike on a bus or truck because you cannot drive in Hong Kong without a special license”. “How stupid!” I thought. Anyway, the officers were all very helpful and now they wanted to help me to put my bike on a bus. I thought it was gonna be impossible and it was too. They thought that I could put the bike to the luggage space of the biggest bus, but even that one was far too small to accommodate my monster. Maybe if it was lying but I was definitely not going to do that. At the end they apologized a lot that they couldn’t help me so I had to assure them that I understood that it was not their fault and that I knew they tried hard. The officer that spent the most time with me suggested that I could try another border and gave me its name and some directions.

Apparently, there are 7 border crossings to Hong Kong but I discovered that the one I was sent back to was the one I stopped by first today. This time, however, I didn’t stop at the gate and joined a long multilane queue of vehicles – passenger cars and busses.  When I reached the immigration booths they took me aside and after a while they took me into the biggest processing building where I spent another two hours (after spending about four at the first one) with the same result, only this time they told me that they were sure that the rules were the same at all the other borders and that I didn’t need to try the other ones anymore.

From a shop in front of the building I phoned Lili to inform her about the final result. She was going to try to contact some friends in Shenzhen where I could leave the bike for a few days so that I could still visit her and her mother by bus.

It was after 10PM when I left the customs building and started to search for something cheap to stay in, which I knew was going to be a problem in such a big commercial City. I ended up about 15 kilometers further asking a young couple for help. The girl could speak English and they were both very nice and helpful. They even took me for a dinner, which they paid for. When we found out that all the cheap hotels were full they offered that I could stay in the guy’s office and I gladly accepted. It was 2AM by than.

They woke me up at 7AM, before the other workers would come to work. He was some kind of chief of office in a cultural department and she worked for a company selling computers to America. Against my will to pay for it myself they bought me a breakfast too and then they needed to go so we said bye to each other and they left.