Advertisement
Published: September 18th 2010
Edit Blog Post
Our campsite at night
i played with my camera, using a really long exposure-the light in the sky is lightning. 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 tourist prices there, and everythings in Russian (we're not massive fans of the Russians...) we decided that instead we'd rent some tents from Pete at the banana hostel, and pop down to some undeveloped coastline for a day and a night. We managed to get the tents, and, with an interesting collection of snacks, beer, and water meant to sustain us for a couple
Our beach
The view of the beach and the little island (with some sort of bunker on it) from the top of the mountain. of meals, embarked on our trip to this beach, which involved a taxi, two buses, and a 30 minute tuk tuk ride across some quite interesting terrain! We finally arrived, after going down a practically impassable track, at a tiny fishing village, with a tiny estuary that meant that boats could drive right up to the pontoon, quite a way inland... The problem was that the nice beach was the other side of the river, and to get across we had to get a very unhappy looking man to give us a ride over on a little floating platform...he was charging extortionate fees (£6 for all of us) so we decided to instead try our luck by walking down the edge of the estuary asking fishermen for a lift...the first guy did it for free, and seemed quite overjoyed to have foreigners on his boat!
Finally across we walked along a bit and had just pitched our tent when it started to rain...this was pretty much the first rain we'd had in haikou...but it didn't really matter, we still frolicked like happy little children! Pete and I set about collecting a sizeable amount of wood for our bonfire and,
Kitchen...ish
This is the kitchen of a restaurant we ate at on the way to the beach...notice the wood burning stove, and the fact that hygeine doesnt seem to be their top priority as it was about 5 and almost getting dark we decided to light it swell, which due to our incredible manly skills...was a piece of cake...ish. We also discovered a coconut, named him smoky Joe...adorned him with a hat we had also found, and gave him a Chinese face with charcoal, we then mounted him on a pole and had our own impromptu bonfire night...a little bit early, but hey!
The girls had during this time gone for a wander, and had found people pulling in a massive net, this took them about 2 hours and looked like backbreaking work, but we decided that we would go now and buy a fish to cook on the fire. We cut some bamboo in half and then cleaned, gutted and deheaded the fish, we then put the fish in the bamboo and put it in the fire...in the process losing half the fish, but the other half, when cooked, was absolutely delicious! The storm had by now passed us by, and so we were able to go swimming, with lightning hitting the water out at sea, which was absolutely incredible... There were also some very interesting sparkles underwater when we moved...needless
Netalottasaurus
This is the net they took 2.5 hours to pull in, its quite large...and all for about 2 buckets of fish to say, Pete and I got very excited and decided that we were water fairies.
The next day we woke up to some pretty torrential rain, and finally headed back to the village, again getting a lift off a fisherman, who we paid off with a beer. As we then had a little time to kill, and the fishermen were all bringing in their catches, we bought a couple of squid, and asked the lady at a small restaurant full of mangled looking fishermen, and with some interesting looking food, to cook them. Pete and I also decoded to climb a mountain...which was fun! Though Pete did slip up and gash his leg open, the first injury of the trip! We got back and had the squid, which was delicious, and then started the trip back, I think we all slept pretty much the whole way.
After that we had another week of class...there's so much to learn and do during the week that we don't really get much chance to do anything else that some kind of sport in the uni and eat food and study. I did get a chance to meet up with my Chinese
tandem partner, and something she told me reminds me of how scary china can be....but dad says i shouldnt put anything up cos the Chinese may not like it, so sorry, but you wont find out about that.
Today we went to the beach near haikou called Holiday Beach, which is actually surprisingly nice! Though quite obviously fake, Pete and I rented jet skis there, which involved a huge amount of bargaining, and then, quite obviously against the wishes of the jet ski people, we picked up the rest of our group and had a little mess around. Pete somehow managed to get kata off the back of the jet ski, and then kinda ram the jet ski man when he was coming into the beach, but it was all good fun!
Were now all back and about to go out for an international student night out, so il hopefully put this up tomorrow...
Advertisement
Tot: 0.14s; Tpl: 0.015s; cc: 9; qc: 55; dbt: 0.0722s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
izzzy
non-member comment
that lightning light is so coooooooooool! i miss ya brudda