Shanghai's Pudong airport: fast trains and fake taxis!

Travelling to and from unfamiliar international airports can be challenging, in terms of comfort, timetabling, and the sheer intellectual effort involved. Shanghai's Pudong airport (pictured below) makes it a bit easier than most, I thought.

It's about 50km, and you can take a taxi, or get straight onto the Metro system. Or, to save a bit of time and also experience another transport mode altogether, you can do most of it on the Maglev train. Magnetic levitation,that is.

It does its 30km trip in a mere 7 minutes, but it manages to do most of it at 300 kph. It was comfortable, and not very full.

So the best deal seemed to be a Maglev/taxi combination journey. This is how I got back to the airport at the end of my visit, and the cost was about $10 for each of the two legs.

It was a different story a few days earlier, when I arrived in Shanghai. The maglev bit went fine, but then I spoilt it all by falling for the fake taxi trick! On my way to the taxi rank at the maglev terminal, I was intercepted by a keen taxi driver, who ushered me over to his nearby, wrongly parked vehicle. Nothing unusual here. Taxi drivers around the world try to subvert their systems to avoid the queue. I checked with him about whether his meter was working and that we'd go by it, and he assured me it was. Sure enough, the meter ticked over slowly, with a series of small numbers gradually increasing. I was expecting them to be totalled at the end of our ride, and it was going to add up to the $10 or so I'd been led to expect.

But no, when he pressed his totaliser button, up popped from nowhere the figure 390 (which translates roughly to $78!) We argued for a minute or two. I suggested we drive into the hotel's driveway properly so I could check with the people there. He refused. He'd gone deliberately past the hotel turn, and we were stuck in the middle of the busy road. I initially refused to pay and sat there. But he had the upper hand. He had my suitcase in the boot, and had made no attempt to open the boot. If I got out of the taxi, he'd have taken off with my luggage. So I cut my losses, agreed through gritted teeth to pay his ransom, and made him open the boot and get out of the car before I got out. Not a good start to my Shanghai experience.

Lonely Planet, I noticed, had a little piece about this scam. They say 'Most taxi drivers in Shanghai are honest, though make sure they use the meter; avoid monstrous overcharging by using the regular taxi rank...'  I should have paid more attention!