Advertisement
Nearing the end of the trip Lovely as our room was the bed was traditional Chinese so really a piece of wooden board and not comfortable. Apparently they believe it is not good for you to sleep on a soft mattress; well there are hard but comfortable mattresses. Our plans for last week were quickly changed by the weather; it started raining Thursday overnight and continued all day Friday and into the night. It was a times like a monsoon and very soon the little pond down from our hostel was totally flooded. We managed to nip into town for breakfast between the showers and again for lunch. Any ideas of driving too far were soon scuppered. About 5pm the power went out in our little valley so we braved the rain and went into town. It was absolute chaos; the roads were flooded up to 6 or 7 inches in places. The police were absolutely useless, directing traffic after rather than before the flood. Luckily you can zip around on a scooter so we made it into town. It was like a ghost town but at least there was power. We opted to go into the Minority Cafe, strange name and Mojitos at 15 Yuan were too good to refuse. The food was pretty average but we had a useful chat with a young Aussie couple who were about to do Europe after China and Mongolia. Then the lights went out which seemed like our cue to go back to the hostel.
Saturday was overcast but not raining so we set off on the scooter to drive out into the local countryside. It was fabulous so green and so peaceful. We drove through half a dozen villages and there were crowds of people congregating in shops etc watching card games, obviously what you do Saturday morning. We meandered through the hills for several hours stopping to take in the scenery. At one point there had been a landslide but luckily there was enough room to get a two-wheeler through all of the cars etc were parked up. We knew we might need fuel and in village number 3 I spotted a little shop with a bike repair place attached, so using sign language we got a few litres of fuel dispensed from a plastic bottle. After about a couple of hours a cafe appeared and we had a beer and enjoyed the view.
We came back to town on the main road which was a bit of a bind and settled for noodles and rice for lunch in the same day as previously. For our last evening we decided to go back to the Indian restaurant and again the food was delicious. Eventually Frieda had turned up and we arranged to have breakfast at 8 am as we had booked out taxi for 9am. She was on the surface very helpful and friendly but everything she quoted us was way more expensive than we could do ourselves. Anyway Sunday morning breakfast was on time and we set off for the airport in Guilin for our flight to Haiku, on Hainan Island, China’s tropical island in the South China Sea. The flight was fine and we arrived in haiku to find that we could not get a train for a few hours and as the station was at the airport we had food in Burger King and used their Wi-Fi. On our two previous flights we had been served good food but this one they gave us a sticky rice cake and it was just fat and sugar. Yuck!!
Our trip took about 2 hours to Sanya in the south and a taxi got us to our hostel. We had a fabulous big room and balcony and a bathroom bigger than many rooms we have had. It was boiling hot and really humid and what we had seen from the taxi did not fill us with enthusiasm. We found a local place to eat and had a few beers and went back to the hostel which was up the steepest hill ever and it was still 30C at 8pm!! Thankfully the A/C had cooled the room and the bed was comfy. We had breakfast and went out in search of a diving outfit, the real purpose of our tropical trip. It was boiling hot so we popped into a fabulous chilled place for iced tea and coffee. The beach was okay but there was no swimming, the red flags were up!! The diving places were not equipped for real divers just for tour groups to dip their toes in the water, so to speak. We beat a hasty retreat back up the hill, which seemed to get steeper with each climb. There were signs in Russian everywhere and we realised that this was the winter playground of rich Russians, hence the huge hotels etc.
Our evening meal was fine but something set off a return of the Delhi belly and made me feel pretty rough the next day. I started antibiotics straight away, not wanting a repeat of the previous episode. The thought of spending 10 days in Sanya did not fill either of us with enthusiasm so we decided to jump ship and shorten the trip. Chris re-jigged the flights and we decided to fly back to Shanghai and then on from there back home. Our travel back was not without problems and Chris had a one hour journey to the train station, on no 4 bus only to find they only sell tickets from 5am the day before travel!! Next day we did the same journey to get the tickets after the guy in the tour office didn’t show up!! During this period we found ourselves gravitating towards the lovely coffee shop or Starbucks to eat plain western food, a sure sign we had lost our enthusiasm. Leaving Sanya was a hard slog we arrived early at the airport and had lunch in Burger King and then found our flight was delayed by several house, eventually three hours. We got food and a drink provided by the airline.....from MacDonald’s. I cannot remember ever in my life having two meals from these paces in one day ever in my life!! We landed eventually in Shanghai at 8.15pm and did not get to the hostel till about 10.30pm, a long day.
Shanghai can wait till the next blog but we will chalk Sanya down to experience!! One last blog from China once we get back next Tuesday. Take care Norma
Advertisement
Tot: 0.112s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 5; qc: 44; dbt: 0.0342s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb