China Part 7 - Hainan Island:

After Hong Kong:

We left Hong Kong with the vague plan of heading for Vietnam, but we were still to early to meet up with Christiana and Richard. While on the train to Shenzen I was looking through the Lonely Planet when I remembered about a place that Simon had mentioned called Hainan. Apparently it is sometimes called “The Hawaii of Asia”, that was just what we needed so we booked our ticket to Ghangzhou, from where we could get a train to Hainan.

In Ghangahou we had no problems booking a sleeper train but it did leave us some time to spare so we had a look around the town. Its a bit of a strange place and has a lot of wholesale shopping outlets that seem to provide most of China with its cheap tourist tat. Both myself and Fran had commented that we had a strange feeling wandering around Ghangzhou (we only had small rucksacks on as we left our big bags in storage at a hotel) but we both thought at different points that someone had been following us. Just as we were getting back to the station I heard Fran shout out, I spun around to see her confronting a man whose hand she had caught in her rucksack only moments before – I started shouting at him to cause a scene, luckily we could see he didn't have time to get to any of her belongings and he made the wise decision of snaking away. Good on Fran for catching him in the act though! That was enough of Ghangzhou so we hid out in KFC until the train was ready to go.

Hainan Island:

As Hainan is an island the train to get there is rather special. We caught a regular sleeper train but when it arrived at the coast, they put the whole train on a ferry, which took it across the channel to the island, where it continued its journey! Only in China! It took most of the day to get around the island (its almost as big as the Northern part of Vietnam!) but we eventually arrived at the station, and got a taxi to Sanya. We were staying at Peters place – Blue Sky International Hostel, but we had a bit of trouble finding it. A few calls to Peter later and one of his staff met us and lead us to the hostel. It is a very friendly place only minutes away from the beach and Peter (his English name) the Chinese owner is a friendly, funny guy.

The beach in Sanya doesn't disappoint, with near white sand stretching out in front of an aqua-marine sea fronted by palm trees and sun loungers. The resort is packed with Russians, it is also growing in popularity with the Chinese who seem to think it is essential to dress as if you are in Hawaii, with matching shorts and shirt floral combinations! It does make you laugh to see whole family walking around in the same print. We spent our time sunbathing and relaxing, and eating great, cheap local food (Fran had lots of seafood). Unfortunately on only the second day I managed to nearly brake Fran's little toe when we were messing around on the beach, she spent the rest of the time hobbling around in pain. At the hostel we had met some great fun people and especially became great friends with 2 girls – Marlene from Germany and Astrid from Austria. We all hung around together most of the time.

Our original plan had been to stay on Hainan for maybe 3 or 4 days, but as it was so nice it became 5 or 6, then a Typhoon hit the island and we couldn't get a ferry so we ended up staying for over a week! I can think of worse places to get stuck though. There were a lot of friendly people staying at the hostel and one night Ian and Ping convinced half the hostel to go to a Karaoke bar! We had a great time singing for a few hours before moving to an odd dance club that had a spring loaded floor!

I have to cut into this story here and give you a bit of insight as to how good the food actually was here, it was not really Chinese food as we came to know it (all bones and no meat so to speak), it was varied, cheap, fresh and delicious. We had two favourite haunts, a local restaurant on a corner with plastic tables and chairs for furniture which you would not look twice at but for the hoards of locals eating there all the time. The second haunt was more touristy and was called the Summer Food Court which was a series of stalls selling fresh seafood and other goodies for such reasonable prices! Marlene, Astrid and I share a love of seafood and twice had huge seafood platters complete with crabs, sea snails, calamari, prawns the lot for only 60 yuan (about 6 quid!).

Our whole week was spent either eating, drinking or talking about food and although basically all we did was go to the beach, we will always remember Hainan as the place where we forged some great friendships. I really do think that when we look back on our travels, it's not just the places that spring to mind, but the great people that you meet! We are now keen to explore lots of places in Europe that we hadn't thought about visiting before simply because we have made some great friends who we want to make sure we meet up with again.

Next stop - Vietnam!