Turtles all the way down

March 2003.

“Outbreak of a severe and mysterious respiratory epidemic. Highly contagious with several people dead already. The main area of impact is Hong Kong and Guangdong Province.”

This is not, I repeat, NOT good news to hear as your plane is speeding down a runway at 100 miles per hour, getting ready to take off for Hong Kong where you would head off to Guangdong Province for a three-day visit.

Let’s back up a bit. I was working for this company. Over the last two years, the high-tech bubble had burst taking down not just the dot-coms, but other more established businesses as well. It was getting harder each quarter to make money. We sold equipment to telecom service providers, in particular, those guys that make your cell phone work. So we get sold to another company that has a large facility in Shezhen.

So here I am, taking off for a 16-hour flight to Hong Kong, as a mystery flu-like disease is breaking out in said city. Sitting next to me is a Chinese co-worker who was reading the Chinese-language newspaper article to me. We looked at each other and shrugged. You have to choose not to worry about things you can’t avoid.

I’d never been to Hong Kong before, but it and Shanghai have the reputation of being the cities in China that are the best to visit, if you’re a westerner. We were not going to spend much time in Hong Kong, however. We would land at the airport, then take a bus across the border to the mainland Chinese city of Shenzhen. Even though Hong Kong was no longer a British protectorate, it is treated as a “country within a country” by China, with its own currency, economy and immigration and customs laws. Shenzhen is a relatively new city developed as part of a “Special Economic Zone” in the Guangdong province.

Did I mention that it’s a 16-hour flight? I’m pretty good at keeping myself occupied and generally sane on long flights, but this was my longest yet and by the end my muscles ached non-stop from all of the inaction. I really wanted to jog up and down the aisles, but I suppose that would be against some law.

So we land in Hong Kong, pass customs, and I can’t help but notice the people walking around in masks. Not for the last time I would think about how much I really don’t want to get sick with whatever is going around. We hop on a bus that takes us to the border with mainland China. Two interesting things happen. First, we have to go through customs twice more - once to leave Hong Kong and again to enter mainland China. The other thing is that we have to switch sides of the road as we enter China. In Hong Kong you drive British style, on the left, whereas in China it’s on the right.

As an aside, ever notice that island nations tend to drive on the left? Is this a British Empire thing? England, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, Bermuda… I’m sure there are more examples.

After about three hours of journeying we finally arrive at a Holiday Inn somewhere in the middle of Shenzhen. I get to my room and have problems sleeping not just due to jetlag but also because of the virus that seems to be breaking out in this part of the world. I hop on the Internet and find that it’s called SARS and not only is it mysterious but its also fatal to most people who catch it. Well, that’s going to help me catch some Z’s.

Three days of business goes by. My co-workers are increasingly paranoid about SARS. One of the people we’re meeting with has a bad cough. Of course he insists on accompanying us everywhere, even to dinner. In China, food is usually shared, so the same chopsticks that go into someone’s mouth goes back into the shared food and…you get the picture.

One night we were taken out to an “American” restaurant in Shenzhen. About the only thing American was that we didn’t share food. Quite literally, they screwed up everyone’s orders. Their specialty was steak, which I ordered and promptly dubbed “misteak” as it looked more like ham and tasted like old sawdust.

We made our way back to the Hong Kong airport. No one was sick, though I’d been double-dosing my vitamins, as if that would help. Wandering around amongst the masked travelers, waiting for the plan to board, I come across a TV showing CNN.

President Bush was speaking, but since I had nothing better to do, I listened in. He explained how the US had feet on the ground in Iraq and the bombing had begun in earnest.

Great. Here I am, 8000 miles from home with a mystery epidemic breaking out all around me, and now we’re at war. I had visions of planes being grounded again like after 9/11. I had visions of my flight being delayed hours if not days. My wife was six months pregnant and I could only imagine how much fun it would be explaining any of the above scenarios to her.

As luck would have it, my plane took off on time and the war had little impact on my ability to get home that day. For once, I actually looked forward to 16 hours in coach.