Hi Who? Haikou!

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We had nine days to spend in the Hong Kong area, so we went looking for day trips to China and found this 2 day cruize to Haikou. Haikou is the largest city on an Island in the Hainan region of China. It was a cheezy cruize but we did get to see this little city in China. There were some very modern buildings in Haikou but we were amazed at how many were vacant. From the ground they appeared to have condos that would sell for a million in the USA, but you could clearly see that although they were completely finished for possibly months, nobody appeared to be living in them. Also, we were there on a workday, during the day, and it was surprising how few people and cars were around. Tall buildings with few cars or people? What? Why are these nice buildings empty when people are living in shoddy housing in other areas of town? A friend mentioned once to me that in Bejing they also have beautiful empty buildings. Does anybody know why? I could make some western-prejudiced assumptions, but I wonder what the official government reason could be?

We visited the Tomb of Hai Rui. The tomb was built during the Ming Dynasty(1368-1644) to celebrate Hai Rui, a celebrated statesman for his honesty and clean living. (http://www.freesanya.com/haikou.html) We also visited the Wugong Temples which were originally constructed during the reign of Emperor Wanli in the Ming Dynasty.

This was Kim's first cruize and my second.

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