So near, yet so feared: the rust is history

The ripping off of foreigners used to be institutionalised on the mainland. Train, museum and park-entrance tickets once cost twice, sometimes 10 times, what locals had to pay. Nowadays everything is the same price for everybody - and we're all being ripped off.

A case in point is the ex-Soviet aircraft carrier Minsk, anchored in Shenzhen's Dapeng Bay, a 46 yuan (HK$58) taxi ride from Lo Wu. The Minsk World military theme park sounded so romantic in the adverts, I thought it would be full of pomp, circumstance and uniforms, with submarines thrown in and the Minsk as its centrepiece. As it turns out, the boat is the theme park.

Rousing Mando-pop blares as visitors make their way gingerly across the large, crumbling gangplank, where a cleaner in a blue sailor suit is brushing up flakes of rust. Whatever the entrance fee goes on, it can't be maintenance, for the hulking (yet strangely elegant) vessel looks like it hasn't received a lick of paint since its construction, in 1978.

Down below, the boat is empty except for what seems like 100 souvenir shops on each deck and a caricaturist displaying drawings of such luminaries as David Beckham, Mr Bean and Albert Einstein. There are photos of Soviet seamen in their 1970s moustachioed splendour amid military greats like Mikhail Kalashnikov, as well as propaganda posters from the Soviet glory days, such as the one of a Red Army soldier bayoneting a black, squirming swastika: "Die, fascist poisonous snake!"

At the far end of the enormous flight deck, with our own Plover Cove Country Park as a magnificent backdrop, a forlorn orange helicopter sits rusting away, looking like a fat, dead insect. Its bent and sagging wings, torn open by the elements, have what looks like scrunched-up aluminium foil inside them, its tyres are flat and half melted into the metal deck.