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Published: April 24th 2010
After dropping off Ross and Gus at the airport in Guilin on a warm February evening we walked over to the nearest travel agent and looked into a few “what ifs”. We knew we had been cold for three months with little, if any, reprieve. We craved more than anything to simply plop down outdoors, breath clean air, and enjoy a cool (not cold) 633ml
Shan Shui, Mountain-Water beer with a good book. Not shivering for more than an hour was also a high priority. What if we could find a cheap ticket south? We had cash, passports, our small travel backpacks, and a solid ten days to travel before Donna and Larry would arrive to Yun’an Province. So we that evening we marched into a small well-chilled travel agency with open minds based solely on the ‘If you don’t ask, the answer is always
no" mentality.
Sanya, Hainan Island, China. One-way tickets departing in 18 hours. $72. Sanya sits as the southern-most point of China, squarely on the 18th parallel north of the equator; this little beach town more or less cooks year-round. It is home to white beaches, palm trees, and all those other things typical
First Rules... then Fun
Who wants to party with this woman?! Just read the rules an buy the same hat Kelly is wearing and you too can go crazy -- its that easy!to a cheap beach town. Throughout all of China our travels have led to cheap food, cheap tickets, cheap lodging, and cheap entertainment. For some odd reason we assumed that travel to the southern tip of Hainan Island would be like any travel other elsewhere in China - cheap. Turns out we showed up to the blue-light special on aisle 18 two months too late...
Unbeknownst to us, only six weeks earlier, Sanya was given the official go-ahead from the bosses sixteen hundred miles away in the Northern Capital to partake in a grand experiment. Their edict declared Sanya a designated and very isolated test-tube test-run in developing an “internationally competitive tourist destination.” We later read a New York Times article titled,
On China’s Hainan Island, the Boom Is Deafening describing the economic goings on in Sanya:
The Visun Royal Yacht Club, China’s largest, plans to buy a helicopter for the use of its members. A golf course that charges $180 per round is opening 220 villas, each with its own butler, swimming pool and spa — “I want to get it into the Guinness Book of World Records for the most spas anywhere,” the manager says. Happy in the Shade
Perfect reading conditions. Then there are the property speculators flying to this resort town from across China with bagfuls of cash, to buy apartments whose cost per square foot rivals parts of Manhattan. Five-star hotels during the recent Lunar New Year holiday charged $1,500 or more per night; one company charged $80 just to camp out in a tent.
“People are coming with entire bags full of cash,” said Raymond Hau, general manager of the Sun Valley Golf Resort, which is building the 220 luxury villas. “I’ve seen this myself. A man had a bag and unzipped it. Boom. ‘Here’s the deposit,’ he said. ‘I want two apartments.’ … The apartments — sweeping sea views, bathtubs on balconies and sofas wrapped in velvet — are being pre-sold for an average of $885 per square foot, comparable to New York prices, said Wu Lei, a spokeswoman for the real estate company.
A few things we really enjoyed/noted about Sanya that made the experience much more foreign than a usual trip to the beach:
*Because of the new economic zone status, our time in Sanya started off with a jaw-dropping and quite unanticipated expense of hotels.
As we arrived to the sandy little town we assumed to be met with the standard price of about 120 RMB ($17 USD) for a private room with a window. In the end we landed the best deal in town -- one tiny room sporting two twin beds with ¼” thick bamboo mattresses and a window looking into the house-keeping quarters - starting at $30/night and then jumping to $95/night during the Chinese New Year.
*Everyone loves a good barbeque and that, mixed with sunshine, palm trees, and of course lots of fish makes the idea of a BBQ almost ideal. If things are extra hot, and they almost always are in Sanya, splash it all down with a cold beer for an even more genuine beach-comber experience. So far, so good. But an inevitable result of fish barbeques on the streets of a beach town is that of surplus fish juice. Turns out mixing loads of fresh fish juice with extra hot sun and no storm drains makes for an excellent olfactory cocktail; and if one can call the streets of Sanya an olfactory cocktail, then our noses were flat-out inebriated and working hard to stop the spinning.
BBQ!
Fresh Fish Barbeque! Fish Juices! Hot Sun! Food inspector! *Back state-side, we all aspire to be “that person” with a fit, trim body and a light (not too dark) tan. Definitely a status symbol, a healthy tan indicates that one has time and interest devoted to their fitness and the outdoors - a sort of visual proof for a healthy life-style. Middle-kingdom-side however, the reverse plays true as those with the dark tans are the ones simply not fortunate enough to have made their way out of an agricultural existence. Whiter is better and the sunscreen available at Wang’s Beach Store come in two types - SPF 40 with bleach or SPF 40 with whitener. Either choice offers the promise of skin whiter than before the vacation… I suppose with the first choice, one at least knows the whitening additive to be bleach as opposed to latter where the magical additive could be surplus “milk” from a few years back. Anyway, regardless of our noble attempts to smear as much sunscreen on our pasty little backs as possible, we both got nicely burned on our second day of six and for the remainder of the trip spent our time scurrying from one shady spot to another wearing large
sunhats.
*Our experience, language-wise, was very similar to our experience in Ha’erbin where locals assume you don’t speak English or Chinese and shoot for the most popular alternative of
russkiy yazyk also known as Russian. Most menus, hotel names, and beach etiquette signs often lacked English all-together and instead came in the two most popular flavors - 中文, China talk or Mandarin and русский язык, aka “Russian tongue”. The one piece of signage we did manage to find in English illuminated in great detail the Chinese expectations for proper beach decorum. Noted at the very bottom of the official-looking list of decrees Citation #9 stated, “The result is complacent when the notice is disobeyed.” (“Hey get a load of this, Xiao, I found this great new website to do all of our Chinese-English translations; this way we don’t have to hire that summer intern…”)
*Matching beach attire seemed the norm and an absolute necessity and as we made our daily pilgrimage to the seashore we became more and more aware of entire families dressed in identical Hawaiian-style tops and bottoms. It felt as though the travel agent, after booking the vacation package and asking for a home phone
and national ID number, the agent also asked for the shirt and shorts size of all those participating in the event; that way, upon their arrival to the sunny island they could be greeted at the airport with proper holidaying apparel. This held true for elderly couples, young honey-mooners, and full-scale four-generation family reunions. We felt out of the loop.
An experience fully on scale with everything else in China was that of Chinese Lunar New Year. By 10 pm on the evening of the 13th of February, every man, woman, and child fully devoted their attention to the blowing-up of something. We wore of sunglasses to the beach that night as three-year-olds ran around with roman candles, old men threw M-16s into the sand, and all the twenty-somethings worked at proving their manliness by igniting suit-case-sized packages loaded with three-inch shells. We sat under seaside palm leaf umbrellas and watched fully-grown men revert to their pre-pubescent mentalities as they ran around with lighters and firecrackers. We saw more fireworks that evening than in our whole lifetimes combined and the following night offered more of the same.
We had received full warning of the Chinese New Year
Chinese New Year on the Beach
Lighting of the Chinese paper lanterns displays and had anticipated an amateur show of this size; stupid-big. What we did not expect was the multitude of 天灯,
tian deng, or “sky lanterns” released out above the ocean and into the night sky. The beautiful red luminaries often had messages hand-scrawled onto their sides and the launching process of the oil-soaked paper balloons appeared to be a full-family effort as large groups of people gathered to prepare, light, and ultimately release the glowing red balloons into the dark night air. Standing in the midst of the people sending them off added a temporary and quite welcome peace from the tremendous ruckus around us and provided a unique parallel to the Chinese New Year - endless noise and bright lights of the fireworks coupled with the gentle drifting of silent lanterns over the seas of the South Pacific.
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Heather
non-member comment
I really enjoyed your China post! Sanya sounds really interesting. I spent the Lunar New Year in Korea two years ago and it was so amazing! Your post reminded me of that trip. My blog is looking for travel photos, etc, to share. If you have the time, check it out at dirty-hippies.blogspot.com, or email me at dirtyhippiesblog@gmail.com. Continued fun on your travels! Heather :)