Trip to China by sea

Going to China by surface is full of uncertainty.

We thought it's more time saving and cost effective to travel to China through Kinmen and Xiamen since there's less hurdle than to go through the international route. We used to have to go to CKS international airport where is about 1 hours away from Taipei, waited for one hour, fly to HK, change plan and then finally fly to China. It takes almost one day to complete the journey.

It used to be that only Kinmen born people are allowed to travel to Xiamen (China) by sea due to political tension between China and Taiwan. The new president came to rein and new regulation is in place. Now this route is opened to ordinary Taiwanese. We tried it out.

From Taipei to Xiamen, we have to take a domestic flight from Taipei airport to Kinmen. Then there's a shuttle bus to take us from Kinmen airport to the ferry harbor. We registered ourselves at the shuttle bus counter, they gave us a box of snacks.

The ferry boat is nothing special. It's a rather cheap communication vehicle for local people. It can accommodate a couple of hundred passengers and is run by Chinese (not Taiwanese) people. There's so such thing called "service" at all. It's just a mean of crossing the sea.

The ferry trip takes about 1 hour, then we landed at Xiamen "international cruise center". The building is much newer and bigger than the one in Kinmen. There are many new building construction work going on just right out of the harbor.

It's all very fine on our way to Xiamen by sea. We got into troubles on our way back.

We flew from Nanjing to Xiamen to take the ferry on our way back to Taiwan. The travel agency was so ignorant that they didn't leave enough time for us to travel from Xiamen airport to the harbor, which takes about 20 minutes. We missed our ferry at 12:30.

Ferry from Xiamen to Kinmen leaves per every one hour. We had to standby for the 1:30 one. At 1:00, we were told the 1:30 ferry was canceled due to the rough sea condition and we had to wait for 2:30 one. At 2:00, we were told again the boat at 2:30 would not leave either. We waited again. It was about 3:00 when they announced all the afternoon ferries were canceled. We ended up spending a night at Xiamen.

The problem resides on that once your boat/flight is canceled, you fall into the category of "seat-unbooked" passenger type. We had to get up earlier to go to the ferry port to standby the next day. We arrived at 8:30 to wait for the 9:30 ferry. It didn't take too long to make us start panicking. The 9:30 ferry was full and we weren't able to get on. Every ferry was booked out in the morning. We had no idea and no information to know if we could get on any of them. Even we got on boat, we were not sure whether we could get on plane to Taipei at Kinmen. Fushing airline ground staffs were complete lack of information of what is going to happen next. They just told us to wait. There were many passengers waiting, uncertainly like us at the waiting hall.

Finally we were lucky enough to take 3 seats on the 10:30 boat. The return trip was rough. The sea was not as peaceful as the one we came. The boat was full of passengers benefiting this cheap option traveling between two countries. Some of them got really sea sick during the trip. The boat was really full and we were very glad to be able to get on.

We spent two good days to come back from China with lots of waitings and uncertainties. It's not a perfect route for business travelers at all. We could have missed our appointment with customers if the problems had happened on our way to China. There were many problems for this route. There was almost no possibilty to complain and the major reason is that the route is opperated by Chinese people who don't care much about service quality.

Eventually we all got back to Taipei through a small plane from Kinmen, after going through two days hassel.