Living the Hard Life: Lazy Tropical Days

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June 24th 2007

Published: August 6th 2007

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mattylee

Lizard Number Two

The Great Sanya Exploratory Mission

My last report from Hainan wasn't very positive, I admit that. In fact, it was really harsh on the poor little island considering that I'd only been there a few days. Being the conscientious guy that I am, I decided to do some more detailed research into the workings of the island, an aim that I almost totally failed to succeed in.

I've spent somewhere in the proximity of 12 days in Sanya now, the beach side metropolis that practically is Hainan, doing virtually the same thing every day. David (my Israeli roomate) and I wake up late as the sun is too strong for us to go to the beach any earlier than 4pm (a lesson learned through painful sunburn). Just down from our expensive yet fun hostel is a small restaurant that turns out the best home-made noodle dishes I've ever eaten - in quantities larger than even I can handle in the morning - which I frequent almost every day. Beside that lies a row of fruit stalls where one can pick up a Coconut for 60 cents or a Mango for 50; along with the best fruit shakes around. Not

Another Flower

just the best tasting either (the secret ingredient is condensed milk), as the service that comes with it makes the shakes irresistible. My pineapple shakes are a little too big for the cups so the girls sit me down in a chair out front, feed me free Rambutans, and wait for me to drink enough of the shake for them to be able to top me up again. This continues for five minutes or so until I've essentially drunk two whole shakes. Then, because I've displayed uncharacteristic consumer loyalty by going to the same stand each day, they give me a 30% discount, enormous considering they only cost $1.50 to begin with.

Once the morning gluttony is over we hit the beach, the long white strip some fifty meters further down the road. The waters are clear for the most part, occasionally there are surfable waves (if only I could afford to rent a board), the sun beats down upon thousands of completely-other-that-scantily dressed Chinese girls, and it is possible to get a massive section of the water all to yourself by virtue of the robotic nature of Chinese swimmers; that is, there is a net constructed on the

What I Want to be Doing

Bikes are expensive here. :(

beach, or more accurately a roped off area (there is no net attached, it is simply a means for poor swimmers to know when they've gone too far out), inside which almost all people swim, thus leaving the rest of the sea to me.

Around 6:30pm we retire back to the guesthouse, have a shower, and then start our other main activity: unsuccessfully trying to impress young women.

So, as you can see, my efforts of exploring Hainan's rich cultural and natural gifts has been waylaid by my inner laziness. All the wonderful things that are to be seen on this island, such as Yalong Bay (an expensive resort beach that is not much better than Dadonghai), the minority villages (which I'm told are fake unless you really get off the track, something that I would do if motorbike rental didn't require mortgages), the world's largest aquatic Buddha (a 108m tall statue in the South China Sea), the rock that appears on the 2 yuan note (a note which is not used anymore), or Wuzhi Shan (the island's tallest mountain), have gone unappreciated by me. But hey, I don't mind, I have a tan, a Pineapple shake and

Italians

Jealous? You should see the beach photos.

the email adresses of nine Italian girls.

Hainan's Tropical Heart

After a good nine days of beach-bumming, watching surfing movies in Russian owned bars while playing pool and drinking expensive beers, eating BBQ and drinking in night-markets, pestering my hostel staff for discounts, and generally doing exactly what I want, I decided that I should get out of Sanya. I would have left Hainan itself but I wanted to wait till Monday for that as a new Danish friend of mine (yes, the twelfth this trip), Felix, wanted to join me in my next adventure (more about that next time). This left me three days and a whole island to explore so I put my finger down on the map, the abridged Lonely Planet version that is, and set off for Jianfengling.

Jianfengling is a national park, or forest preserve, or whatever the Chinese government chooses to call it, suffice to say that the words eco and tourism were once again placed in excessive proximity, in the highlands to the west of Hainan. Only 10km back from the beach the plains rise steeply to peaks above 1400m, thus creating a lush tropical rainforest. The suggested activities

Thomas (Bei Bei)

The hostel has a cute dog that everyone loves to play with, he also has the strangest way of sleeping, it's something to do with how he just flattens out.

for the park mainly revolve around relaxing, taking tours in cars, and spending money (it's used for business conferences). My activities were supposed to counterpoint this: running around, walking randomly through the jungle, and being a cheapskate.

To start my cheap adventure I chose to use local buses instead of taking a taxi, thus saving hundreds of kuai, however, the trip there turned out to be terribly expensive. A good-natured motorbike with sidecar driver picked me up from the turnoff where the bus left me and took me into town, however, without communication (his accent was too much for me) or any valid information regarding the park, he ended up driving me all the way to the resorts some 16km inside the park boundaries. I'll admit that it was fun to drive up a mountain in a sidecar, I just wish that I could have been doing the driving and that it hadn't rained.

Inside the park there is a resort next to a man-made lake, with thatched bungalows at the waterside, that looked bissfully like dozens of my favourite memories from South-East Asia. I decided that I wanted to stay further inside the jungle though as the

Monica and Me

One of the Italian girls that stayed at the hostel, if she weren't engaged I fear she would have stolen me.

idea of a cleared area and man-made lake inside a protected national park didn't sit well with my sensibilities, so I headed uphill to a secluded jungle retreat. Thanks to my whining personality I got a room for 1/3 the posted price and I was set. I had the best room of my whole trip, the area was all but deserted, and everywhere I looked there was dense rainforest: perfect. Just next to the rooms there was a walking track which led on a 2km circuit of the rainforest, and I decided that nothing would complete the day better than a good old walk.

Truth be told, the park is fairly well preserved, where it suits the Chinese to have it so. On the walking track the forest was almost untouched unless you counted the litter around the entrance (Chinese tourists come to the entrance, take a photo, and then leave. You'd never find one of them actually walking around a tourist attraction) or the birds that mimicked chainsaws. Here in the forest, away from the resorts and farms (yes, there are farms inside the park for supplying the resorts), far distant from the roads (not really, I accidentally

David

My awesome Israeli room mate eating his usual dinner: white rice.

ran into one of the roads while walking), things were as they should be: quiet, peaceful, natural and real. Then I found the Chinese methodology behind conservation: when you break a rule, celebrate it.

Think on this: in my country, conservation means not destroying nature, say for example, not cutting down trees in national parks. In China, you can cut down a tree in a national park, but afterwards you have to celebrate the fact that you did so that everyone thinks it was a good thing. I found a stump, a very large stump mind you, sitting by the path. There was a cleared area around it, seating for a whole tour group, and a large plaque proclaiming that the tree had been specially selected to be chopped down and used as a pillar in the reconstruction of Beijing's Forbidden Palace. I'm sorry China, but that doesn't count. Of all the millions of trees in your country that you could have cut down, including many in the same region that aren't inside the protected park, you chose to cut down one of the few ones that you're not allowed to. But then again, they make the rules, so

Django and Felix

Crazy mates, looking normal.

they can break them, I just wonder if Chinese tourists notice this kind of hypocrisy, oh wait, they never walk past the entrance so they would never see it.

I spent the following morning strolling through the forest as well, past spiders bigger than my hand, leeches hanging from ever leaf (Chinese leaches though, they are so dumb it's not funny. I found more leaches sucking on my trouser leg than my actual flesh. Despite the damp, the rain and the heat - perfect conditions for leaches - only one of them managed to get me; quite a disappointment), butterflies by the thousands, lizards, frogs, bugs, bugs, and more bugs, plus some rodent thingy that ran away too fast for me to see it properly. I had a ball walking off the stone paths and up game trails into the hills, but I was unable to find the path I was after. I had a map marking a trail over the main peak to the other side of the ring-road which I thought to be the ideal walk, but alas, the paths were too grown over and disused.

By midday I was content and all I dreamed of

Sidercar Ride

On the road to Jianfeng

was sitting on a beach with a Pineapple shake so I resolved to leave. I also resolved to get back to Sanya cheaper than I had got there. This is how I did it: I walked along the road for three or four k's, I hitched a ride with a Chinese family down the mountain, I walked another few kilometers, I got a ride of one of the sidecars into town for only 2 kuai because she didn't have to turn the motor on (oh I love downhills), I got a ride in a Seoungthaew (truck with seats in the tray) for 5 kuai to a town half-way to Sanya, and I got a 22 kuai bus the final distance. All in all, it cost 120 kuai to get to the park, and only 31 kuai to get back. That's my kind of discount!

Last Days in Sanya

This leaves the tale at today, my last day in Sanya with my friends. David, Django (as in Jango Fett, a Canadian teacher here), Felix, Sunny (Django's Chinese assistant), Scarlet (another Chinese teacher) and I planning to do that one thing that I have avoided at every turn. The