Traveling from Hong Kong to Mainland China on the new bullet train

A new high-speed rail link opened between Guangzhou and Hong Kong in late 2018. We've never been to mainland China, and for us train nerds, this was a perfect excuse to go.

Hong Kong Station Exterior

First off, Americans need a visa to go to mainland China. We were originally thinking we'd just do a day trip, but when I started checking a few Hong Kong transportation forums, it seemed clear there is no way to get a day trip visa issued on the spot in Hong Kong.

We decided to get the 10 year, multiple entry visa so we could go back again without having to do any further paperwork. There's a consulate here in New York City, and I did all of the visa paperwork in person. We were flying in to Hong Kong and taking the train into Guangzhou, which actually caused me some trouble with the people at the consulate. They are very focused on having your flight information for your arrival into mainland China, and we had none. The train tickets are only available 30 days in advance, so there was no way I could show them a confirmed train ticket, either. Since the train is new, the staff didn't seem know it existed. I literally had to give the agent my phone with the train booking website (in Chinese, of course) so she could look it over. She then took my phone, made a photocopy of the screen (!), and put that into my application packet along with my Guangzhou W Hotel reservation confirmation (TIP: make sure your hotel confirmation shows the address!)

If you don't live near a consulate, there are a bunch of online visa processing services that will handle it all for you for a small fee.

Stunning design

We bought our train tickets directly from the MTR's website. (I had trouble using it with Safari, but Firefox and Chrome worked fine). There are 3 classes of service: Second Class, First Class, and Business Class. One way fares from Hong Kong to Guangzhou are USD $31, $47, and $65, respectively (yes, Business Class is a higher class of service than First Class). We chose to take First Class there and Business Class back. Some trains make more stops than others, so make sure you check the total journey time when selecting a ticket.

Fast forward three weeks. We decide to go down to the beautiful new station the day before our train trip to give ourselves extra time to retrieve our tickets and generally admire and photograph the place. Well, long and frustrating story short: foreigners can't actually use the automated ticket collection, despite the website making you setup a codeword for ticket retrieval. Only people with Chinese or Macao ID cards are able to retrieve their tickets from the machine. Luckily the staffed counter was close by and the line for it wasn't particularly long.

No ticket for you!

Most foreigners will end up here to fetch their online tickets

Departure gates

Once you've got your tickets, it's a lot like boarding a flight at a Canadian airport bound for the USA. You clear customs for mainland China while you're still in Hong Kong and then you go to your gate and wait for boarding to begin. You can help speed the line up by visiting one of the little kiosks in the customs waiting area and pre-entering your information and fingerprints (no cameras are allowed in the customs area, so I couldn't take a picture) There are digital signs with gate and train status information just like at an airport. There's a large seating area that's shared between all of the gates.

Digital signs for status and gate info

Boarding

Our seat was pre-assigned so we headed to our coach once boarding began and found our seats. The First Class seats reminded me a lot of the Green Car seats on the Japanese Shinkansen – a 2 by 2 layout, wide seats, headrests, and individual power outlets. The ends of the cars have a Shinkansen-esque bathroom layout with an open sink area.

First Class car

Open sink area

At-seat power

We departed on time and began our relatively slow trip through the many new tunnels that connect Hong Kong with Shenzhen. Once you go through Shenzhen, you're mostly above ground and the train speeds up quite a bit. The total travel time was around 45 minutes.

The bullet train doesn't take you into the city center – much like Shin-Osaka station, Guangzhou South is a half-hour metro ride from downtown. Given how vast the station is, we had some trouble finding our way to the metro. Almost no one speaks English, so I just used Google Translate (they use Simplified characters here) to ask people which direction to go.

Once we found the station, we encountered a problem that would follow us the rest of trip – nearly everything in China is paid for via WeChat Pay or AliPay. From the metro ticket machines to Starbucks to the city bikes to the old woman in the country market at her vegetable stand – that magic QR code is how people prefer to get paid. We didn't have the correct change for the metro ticket machine, but some extremely helpful people just slapped their phone onto the glass and paid for it. I tried to pay them with cash but they weren't having any of it. It was the first of many kind people we encountered here behind the Great Firewall of China (Facebook, Instagram, and Google are all blocked here). On our next trip, we'll definitely get AliPay set up on our phones before we go.

The metro machine ONLY takes 5 and 10 notes!

So yes, Guangzhou. We spent 24 hours there. We did the Eating Adventures bicycle food tour of the city and absolutely loved it. We stayed at the new W hotel and it was gorgeous. Beyond that, it's China's 3rd largest city and is full of history and architecture we didn't have time to see on this short trip... that's why we got that 10 year visa! One thing I wasn't aware of is that many of these massive infrastructure projects like the Hong Kong high speed rail are being done to create a more unified "Bay Area" megalopolis.

We ate our way across the city

And burned some of it off biking!

After our all-too-brief visit, we headed back to the train station where we'd arrived the day before. Since we'd sprung for Business Class (which is a higher class of service than First), we were supposed to have lounge access but for the life of me, we couldn't find the danged lounge. Embarrassingly enough, we went into to one of those private lounges only to be kicked out when the lounge attendant returned. From the upper mezzanine where the private lounge is, it was easy for her to point us to the official Business Class lounge – it's hiding in plain sight. It's inside a cordoned-off section of the main floor of the train station (see pic).

The lounge is right under your nose!

Sit near the giant air vents in the lounge to keep cool

The boarding scrum was a bit crazier in Guangzhou than in Hong Kong, likely due to the fact that you don't have to clear customs to board the train (customs enforcement happens in HK both directions). The do have a priority boarding line for Business Class so we were able to skip the big line and walk right down to the platform.

Business Class is a small, private cabin with fully lie-flat seats. While a bed may seem crazy for our short trip, remember that you can actually take this train all the way to Beijing, so you might want some quality sleep on that 9 hour journey. We had water, slippers and a snack box waiting for us at our seat, along with a package of moist towels and a train magazine. Each seat has its own power outlet. We departed on time and enjoyed a view of the sunset on our way back to Hong Kong.