Blogs from Hainan, China, Asia - page 11

In the morning, we climbed the mini-mountain (where the arial views are taken from) and I slipped on a slippery rock and got a gash in my leg. It was lucky we brought the first-aid stuff, as the nearest hospital was probably about half an hour away. The nearby village that you can see in the pictures was incredibly primitive, with no apparent electricity, and just wooden slats for beds with no bedding. So interesting to see people living that kind of lifestyle. One smelly man with puffy eyes was telling me that he's forgotten how old he is, but despite that, most of them seemed quite happy just catching fish and chilling out in hammocks and boats, playing cards. Ironically, last night back in my own room was no more sophisticated, as my electricity meter ... read more

It's been quite a while since my last entry, but il try to get you up to speed... Firstly, we got to the gym, finally, a few days after playing tennis and it's surprisingly good! It's pretty much all free weights, and if you overlook weights held together with random wires and a few very dodgy looking pieces of equipment, it could almost be England! We've had a couple (or 3?!) weeks of Chinese lessons now, which have been really good, quite challenging and at some points you just kinda look at the teacher thinking 'what the bloody hell are you talking about?!', but most of the time it's alright! The big thing we've done recently is camp on a beach...the plan was to originally go to sanya, but due to the fact that itl be ... read more

I promised some stories of strange encounters with the po;lice so here they are: 1. Picture us five foreigners on a street at night downtown, happily eating skewered duck’s hearts and ice cream with fish eggs, when we hear some live rock music coming from down the road. Over we go to watch the music and it’s a relatively impressive and loud line-up of rockers, standing outside a restaurant with banners, a red carpet and a small crowd gathered around on the street. Rock music with Chinese lyrics sounds hilarious. We soon realise that they are playing to open up the new warehouse-esque restaurant, but as they were playing right in the doorway, we had to walk straight through the band’s performance to get into it. Once in the huge restaurant, we are greeted by the ... read more

So, cycling to the beach didn't totally work, It turns out that Haikou is a lot bigger than we originally thought!!! We did see a huge park with loads of chinese people flying kites though, which was quite interesting. We also discovered a building project that perfectly illustrates how ridiculous the chinese are...there were lorries and lorries full of rocks driving out along a small track out to sea, which we thought was quite weird, and then we discovered that they were trying to build another island out at sea...that would be connected to Hainan by a tiny track about 5 foot above sea level, kinda dodgy considering that there are about 2 months of typhoon weather a year, and any kind of rough sea will leave this little island completely isolated. Anyway, not to be ... read more

Photos of Haikou... read more