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Published: March 25th 2014
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view at the pool
chilling at the pool Thursday March 20th, left Hong Kong for an hour and 30 min plane ride to Sanya China. Sanya is located on the Southern Tip of China and is the Florida/ Arizona of China. I stayed at The Renaissance Hotel. Beautiful hotel, it is isolated and about 50 minutes from the airport and 40 minutes from downtown Sanya.
If you are new to traveling to China, I highly recommend you hire a driver who speaks english and book tours. The locals at the resort speak limited English and when hailing taxi's or in downtown china besides Hello or Bye Bye there is no English. Or start brushing up on your Mandarin 😊 ..
The goal of this holiday was to see more of Asia and to just relax and enjoy the sun and beach. I did make it in to town a few times, especially when my friend Lisa and her dad joined me in Sanya for the weekend - this was a great treat since Lisa has moved out of Hangzhou and back to Jersey Channel Island so it is rare we get to see each other. The funniest adventure Lisa, her dad and I had was yesterday. We
cucumber martini
Cheers - my new favorite drink took the free shuttle from the hotel into the downtown area. First just navigating to get on the bus when you have 40 mainland Chinese heading to the airport on the bus too is an adventure in itself- they are always on a rush , there is no such thing as personal space and they line up and block and then try to figure out - how they get their luggage underneath the bus without having to move out of the line. I am use to it but for first time travellers here- trust me it can be ANNOYING! We get on the bus after the usual pushing and shoving. The bus stops downtown and we are not really sure where we are and of course no one on the bus including the bus driver speaks english. He points across the street and we see stalls so we assume it is the open market we are looking for to do some shopping- we were so wrong. There was a normal mall, then a small amusement park, a ton of local restaurants and the beach
After walking around for about an 30 minutes, we hit starbucks, thinking we
can get free WIFI- no only if you have a Chinese phone number can you obtain wifi in that starbucks, so I turn on my 3G and find the street with the shopping, we flag down a taxi and thank you iphone, using the map with Chinese writing for streets- get the driver to take us to the location.
We get there and all of the shops have mostly pearls and other jewelary items- so not what we are looking for, then we thought a blonde buy sitting on a bench my be a tour guide- westerner, nope he was a shady russian trying to lure the tourist to his " store" in a building around the corner where the items were better... So then we had him following us around for about 10 minutes before he determined we were not going to follow him.
After determining we were not going to have much success finding the fake items of value without a local to tell us where to find them,we decided to grab a taxi and head back the bar we found the other day - Dolphin Dive. Of course the taxi drive was trying
to overcharge us not realizing we knew how much it cost to get to the location from our current location. After some battling with numbers on the calculator of his iphone we were on our way moving. As we got dropped off across the street from the bar, Lisa decided she wanted to buy China Starbuck mugs- and we were like- oh well look there is another Starbucks right here, we go around the corner and realize it is the same Starbucks we were in hours earlier- we had no clue we were literally dropped off by the shuttle bus earlier in the day across the street from the bar complex- DUH! i laughed for good 10 minutes straight I had tears running down my eyes
After making our big purchases at Starbucks, we hit Dophin Dive until night and then took the shuttle bus back to the hotel. The rest of the trip I am solo but I have been just enjoying taking in the sun and beach... 😊
So just a few more days before I head back to Hong Kong and work... Clear skies and sun and relaxation have been wonderful. Sanya is
a great destination.
Sue
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