The anticipated crowd did not materialize at the Entry and Departure Management Bureau of the Guangzhou Public Security Building on Jiefang Road. Yet the air was filled with excitement as the first applicants got their permits Wednesday morning to tour Hong Kong and Macao as individuals.

He Yanchang, a middle-aged insurance agent, was the first Guangzhou citizen to be granted the permit. She would visit Hong Kong together with her husband and daughter, and planned to stay there for two or three days.

Several new permit holders rushed to Guangzhou East Railway Station to catch the 9:50 am express train bound for Kowloon.

Wednesday marked the first day when permanent residents of Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Huizhou were allowed to tour the two special administrative regions without joining tour groups.

The four cities handled a total of 5,418 applications for Hong Kong and Macao visits Wednesday, with 3,000 from Guangzhou, according to Xinhua news agency.

The cities of Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan and Jiangmen in Guangdong have already carried out the new travel arrangement, which will be extended to residents of Beijing and Shanghai starting September 1.

From 7 am to 9 am Wednesday as many as 600 of these DIY tourists lined up at Shenzhen's Luohu Customs for departure. Although six special lanes were opened, the wait was still around an hour.

A survey shows that most individual tourists departed for Hong Kong at Luohu and Huanggang in Shenzhen; most of those leaving for Macao chose Gongbei.

Guangdong customs have suspended all vacation days for staff members and opened all 66 of the departure lanes to manage the extra human flow.

In Guangzhou, the authority added 200 people to the handling of these tourists. Sixteen more application stations with 65 more windows were added, almost doubling the original capacity for application processing.

Guangzhou media has been advising against joining the "early birds", which reportedly helped in diffusing the application crowd.

But applicants as well as travelers are expected to grow significantly in number in the next few weeks.

A local travel agency is pushing for a Hong Kong weekend getaway tailored for these DIY tourists. "The beauty of this program is, it's affordable to everyone," said one agent.

To cope with the growing number of outbound tourists, the Guangdong tourism department and public security and immigration authorities are planning to set up an advanced warning mechanism. Under the mechanism, prediction, data collection and monitoring will be done regularly and advanced warnings issued accordingly. Information such as the number of applications and daily flow of visitors to the two SARs will be announced through the media and on the Internet.

(China Daily August 21, 2003)