Taxi-drivers

Having hailed most of my cabs in Denmark or Western Europe, this is the image I had in mind when my fellow HK Globers told us we were going to CUHK by taxi: A large, clean Mercedes, seating 4 people, driven by a friendly, clean-shaven and overly polite man wearing a shirt and black shoes. Instead, as we exited the terminal, we were greeted by 3 vehicles looking like lada's built in the 80's covered in commercials, traditional characters and dirt, seating a maximum of 5 (the fifth person sitting where there normally is a gear stick). We split up, 3 or 4 to each cab, and headed towards the drivers.

Hong Kong has some 18.000 cabs and is one of the most densely populated places on the planet. That means bumper-to-bumper traffic most days and cut-throat drivers that are underpaid and overworked. Our taxi driver was a short, stout lady with a boyish hair style and some missing teeth, wearing a dusty fleece sweater and an earpiece from her cell-phone. She quickly grabbed our bags, jammed the trunk with 3 suitcases, and started shouting into her earpiece. The trunk could not even fit 2 bags, but the lady whipped out an elastic cord to lower the lid of the trunk as much as possible (it closed just more than halfway). Then she ushered us into the cab, piled in the remaining luggage on the spare seat, and slammed the vehicle into gear.

If the packing of the taxi had been bizarre, it was nothing compared to the trip. The female driver had 4 cell phones rigged to her wind shield and dash board, and was constantly flipping between them and screaming aggressively in Cantonese. For 40 minutes she only diverted her attention from the phones when she had to pay the bridge fare or curse at other drivers. The poor state of the car, as well as the fact that we were driving on the left hand side of the road and that she was rarely going below 100 kph, wasn't too comforting.

Apparently, cab drivers don't speak much Mandarin, let alone English. So the thought of trying to find your dorm on a new campus with an aggressive driver is not exactly comforting, but we got lucky pretty fast. The taxi meter showed 218, but because of various tolls and charges for bridges and luggage it was a total of 250. We pay, and let a large nod and several loud words of recognition, before she touches her earpiece, starts shouting again as she hops back into the cab, and speeds off down the road.

Calculating the actual fee in Danish kroner, I ended up paying something like 65 kr. for a 40 minute drive. That wouldn't even have gotten me a mile in Denmark. Welcome to Hong Kong!