So near, yet so feared: Just the ticket

Can a machine be racist? In the mainland it can. Well, maybe not racist, but certainly identity-ist - as my friend L and I found out to our chagrin in Guangzhou East Railway Station recently.

Machines have edged out human-operated ticket counters but, as customers have to enter their name (in Chinese characters) along with their ID card number and who knows what else, it takes 10 times as long to buy a ticket from a machine.

Things were to get worse. After languishing for aeons in one of the glacier-speed queues (there are a couple of manned counters but, understandably, they're backed up even more) we found that the machines are only for mainland citizens and Hong Kong residents with a "return to the ancestral village" pass.

But … but … we were only going to Dongguan! Yes, in a moment of madness I had suggested we do something wild and spontaneous - spend the night in an infamous factory town hellhole I had hitherto only observed, shuddering at its ugliness and swearing never to set foot therein, from speeding trains. Now I was suddenly all "conquer your fear of the unknown, tear down your prejudices".

Pretty heroic, in other words, but now we were stuck in a stupid station. We'd just have to spend the night in Guangzhou and start queuing for a manual ticket at 5am, for now I was set on seeing Dongguan with all my heart.

But I had forgotten the golden rule of the mainland: whatever you need will be provided before you know you need it. As soon as we stepped out of the station, a guy sidled up: "Taxi, Shenzhen?" Wow! Er … how about halfway there?

Dongguan turned out not to be a town at all but the entire area between Shenzhen and Guangzhou. The driver kept asking exactly where we were going (not an unreasonable request); so, in a moment of divine inspiration, L proclaimed "bus station". This turned out to be in a place called 10,000 Rivers (Wanjiang), where we immediately found what might be the mainland's least expensive five-star hotel, the interestingly named Sunbelieve International. It had the most ridiculously enormous rooms I've seen - 900 square feet easily. The windowsills alone were deep and wide enough to comfortably seat 11 people (I measured) and the beds - in mainland hotels normally rock hard - were as soft as a local cadre's pudgy hands.

Most of the 10,000 rivers seemed to have been filled in but there was still the Pearl, along which late-night barbecue and beer stalls tempted passers-by. And just across the road from the hotel was a great Sichuan restaurant, with another two - TWO! - within walking distance.

Sometimes it pays to meet one's prejudices head on.