Anyway, after many false starts I finally tracked down 2 TWO! options. One from Nansha (which is in Panyu, the southernmost region of greater Guangzhou) and the other Lianhuashan, also in Panyu. Internet research turned up booking numbers for the Lianhuashan option, so that's where we left from. Subsequent research in Hong Kong revealed that it would also have been possible to come from Nansha, and in fact that there are several other destinations around the periphery of Guangzhou that also run ferry services down the Pearl. As originally expected, the Pearl is still, despite trains and highways, a pretty serious avenue for commerce.
Thinking about all this, I realise that Guangzhou has an official population of 12 million (estimated 16 m) and that that probably doesn't include the population of Foshan (West) and Zhongshan (South0, which are the two adjacent urban areas. I say adjacent and I mean exactly that - if you weren't armed with a map you wouldn't be able to spot the borders by any visible change in topography. So potentially that's 36 (48) million people, still in a geographical area not significantly bigger than Melbourne, and I still haven't included Dongguan, which occupies most of the space between Guangzhou and Shenzhen on the East side.
So maybe, with 60-odd million people in 6000 square kilometers, it's not surprising that I didn't quite find everything out about it in 12 months. In fact, it's not surprising that most of the people who live there don't know everything about it. It's almost surprising that they know anything about it. (Mind you, I probably need to check those population estimates out. They may be a bit on the high side.)
Anyway, HK by boat. A dream come true. It was, alas, a bit damp & a lot foggy, and the windows of the ferry were extremely dirty/salt-encrusted, so I don't really have photographs. In fact, by far the vast bulk of the boats we saw were fishing boats, ranging from 2 person outfits being rowed to massive multi-crane combination fishing & processing vessels. Quite a few dredges, also not surprising in a delta - if you look at aerial photos it's striking that there is in fact usable land in the region, and I'm guessing that managing the course of the river is a serious occupation for quite a bunch of people.
There were a lot of empty general cargo boats as well; I don't know if anything can be read into that because I don't know what the river looks like in good economic times. The boats we saw looked mainly like local cargo - either single container or small general cargo - so I'm not sure how they would be influenced by the export industry downturn. The internal Chinese economy is said to be holding up reasonably well. We did see a couple of international container ships though - one so big it seemed to take minutes to motor past it. It was colossally long.
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