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Published: August 6th 2007
Hainan, the South-East Asian Backwater Most Favoured by Mother Russia
The island of Hainan lies just off the south coast of China, somewhere just a little east of Vietnam. Thus, the island has all the prerequisites to make it another perfect tropical island like those of Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia and Vietnam. It’s warm and sunny, a little too warm right now though, mile after mile of beaches stretch willy nilly around the island, and pineapple shakes are in ready supply. What could be better? This place sounded perfect, so I headed straight for the beachside town of Sanya.
Upon arriving in Sanya, the city on the southern extremity of the island, I was immediately put in high spirits because the area looked just like a part of South-East Asia. It was going to be a solid week of laziness and vain attempts to escape sunburn. As I got to my hostel I started to realise that things were a little different on Hainan, particularly in the pricing department. What would cost me $5 in Vietnam, say a boat trip to an island, is valued at around $30 here. This is because of two things, Chinese entrance fees which are
always ridiculously overpriced, and the hostels love of using taxis. Suffice to say, I didn’t do too many tours and opted for the cheaper option of just sitting on the nearby beach.
Now, as an additional turn of oddity, there is one thing that I’ve noticed about Hainan which is still inexplicable: the town is totally filled with Russians. Not just one or two tour groups of Russians, that would be normal; I actually do mean filled. There are so many Russians visiting Sanya that all signs are written in Chinese and Russian, as opposed to English. Menus are in Russian, waitresses either speak Russian or are Russian. Russian men buy roses for my friends, their Russian wives stare angrily from the other side of the room, Russians own the hotels, Russians cover the beaches, and Russians walk around everywhere paying ludicrous sums for garden variety junk sold by street hawkers. As an English speaker I find it difficult to navigate this town, usually a combination of English and Chinese works, but when the waiters can only speak Russian I’m totally lost. Come on guys, this is China, speak Chinese!
If you go to the beach you notice
Flower
There were one of two nice things on Monkey Island, this flower was among them.a very odd rotational system which has evolved in terms of when you are allowed to swim. At midday the beach is totally overtaken by Russians, you could be excused for mistaking the locale for Estonia, and it’s hard to actually find anyone who isn’t Russian. Around 2:30 all of the Russians leave and if you blinked at an inappropriate moment it would actually appear as though they had all morphed into Chinese people. From 2:30 on to around 4:00 the beach is exclusively the domain of the Chinese, but then it switches back to Russian for a while, finally ending at around 7pm when all the Chinese tourists come out again (the Chinese hate to get tanned so they swim in the late afternoon where possible. On a subsidiary note, it is almost impossible to buy sunscreen here that doesn’t have whitening stuff in it).
If Hainan hasn’t freaked you out yet, please keep on reading as things get weird in a Chinese way. On one day I went walking with three French friends out to the peninsula at the end of the main beach. After getting turned back from a military base, running into a dead end
Floating Village
From the cable car to Monkey Madness. on a path through the jungle, nearly being eaten by spiders, mosquitos and the odd stray Panda, ok not the Panda, we found ourselves on a secluded beach known as Xiaodonghai. Well, to be honest it wasn’t secluded as we had thought it was. From the cliffs above the beach seemed to be deserted as all the resorts were still under construction, but when we got there we walked straight into a Chinese style dive resort. The Chinese aren’t known to be divers as far as I know, a fact which was reinforced that day, I will try and paint a picture of the place for you. As you walk in it appears like any other beachside resort/dive place, there are the required bits of diving gear, the bamboo and thatch buildings, the wooden seating and the bars. Then add to the picture the tourists, approximately one person per square meter either sitting in hammocks or sitting on benches wearing diving suits. Most of the tourists can be placed into groups by their clothing with couples wearing identical shirts and pants, families wearing team colours, old friends wearing shirts with slogans and arrows pointing at each other (similar to “I’m
with stupid”, only more so). Add to the mix a collection of the best Chinglish ever created (“flavour barbeque”, “enjoy the pedestrianised strip, the prohibition vehicle carries on”) and you’ve got an idea of the onshore activities. Throngs of holiday-making Chinese people sit in front of televisions learning how to dive and awaiting their trip out to the reef. Hundreds more are paddling (with flotation devices of course) in an enclosed area on the beach that looks almost, but not quite entirely, exactly like a toilet, and then offshore there is the highlight: the diving. The divers, after having learnt how to turn on the air valve, are marched out onto long pontoons where they board boats which ferry them out to the reefs some 20m from shore, they all jump in and start diving around, just like normal diving. My friends and I walked out on a rocky shelf of dead coral (the beach is actually fake and a lot of reef had to die for its creation) some 50m across so that we were standing perhaps ten meters from one of the dive boats. In front of us were a dozen or so divers exploring the underwater world
My English Friends
The ones that my pimp espoused about. of corals, from the surface. The reef is maybe two feet below the surface at high tide, less so at low tide, and the divers can’t actually sink. Also, most of the coral is dead. Welcome to China, where budget diving means expensive snorkeling.
Needless to say, we all ran away around the rocky side of the peninsula to a real beach.
Hainan Horrorshow
This story must be told. On my first full day in Sanya I went on an organised trip to Monkey Island (my pimp, or should I say receptionist, at the hostel convinced me to go by saying how many attractive girls were also going). The island lies slightly east of Sanya and is famed, not surprisingly, for its population of Rhesus Monkeys. I like monkeys and I like tropical islands, so the trip sounded like fun.
Upon arriving on the island, which is actually called an islet, which is actually part of the mainland even at high tide, things weren’t what I was expecting. Let’s start this explanation with some quotes from the internet; these say what you are supposed to think about the island:
the island is regarded as the perfect paradise for monkeys. Also because of the good management, the island is very neat and clean. Guides all wear uniforms, and are always courteous.
www.freesanya.com
Nanwan, which opened only a few years ago, is a reserve, a wildlife research facility and a tourist attraction. The monkeys are largely allowed to run wild throughout the island's nearly 250 acres
LA
Times
Ok, so what did I see? Well, there were twenty or so monkeys, mostly young babies, sitting around the entrance to the cable-car waiting to be fed. Other than that there were no free monkeys to be seen. There were monkeys chained to the ground, to each other, and to trainers. Monkeys were trained to stand around and perform tricks. The Monkey guard of honour: six monkeys that stood in a row and held flags when the tourists came past but otherwise sat around because they were chained so tightly. The Monkey circus: Monkeys taught to ride bicycles, to walk tightropes. Basically Monkey taught to be afraid of getting beaten, yes, we saw them get hit when they failed to do a trick. I sat there in disgust as this supposed “eco-tourism reserve” was nothing more than an archaic circus and animal torture center. Beyond the circus was a place labeled as “Monkey Jail”, what could this be? Surely not an accurate description? But there it was, a cage with a fake tree and four very sad looking Monkeys.
The Monkey Comedy Show proved to be no better, again they had been trained to do tricks and
Darwen?
Who is Darwen? to pose for photos. We didn’t dare watch the Monkey Motorcycle show, but the sight of a four meter round sphere enclosing a Monkey and a motorbike was enough to send shivers down my spine. Monkey Island is a horror, do not go there, do not support this horrible place that does nothing more than hurt animals for the pleasure of Chinese tourists. What’s worse is that the other tourists loved the place, the clapped and cheered at every trick. The staff of my guesthouse even love the place, they don’t seem to have any respect for the poor creatures at all.
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Scott
non-member comment
Monkeys!
Good to see the monkeys are getting what they deserve. I have seen Planet of the Apes, and I think we need to assert our dominance to avoid this terrible future. Also, big props for putting in a pic of a good looking chic and bringing the phrase "willy nilly" back into popular usage.