A week on Hainan island



Dadonghai Beach, Hainan Island

 I’m back in Wuhan as Spring Festival comes to an end with the Lantern Festival tonight (February 17), considered an especially dangerous time for fires and mishaps since in addition to setting off one last great hurrah of fireworks, people are walking around carrying candle-lit lanterns.

My hotel pool at Dadonghai

I spent the last part of the holidays in Sanya city, on the south coast of Hainan Island in China’s far south, my first visit there. For many years Hainan has been a favorite place for Russians to visit, and there are still plenty of Russians about. Much of the signage is Russian as well as Chinese, but the island is now a favorite destination for Chinese tourists. During Spring Festival, prices skyrocket for hotel space and food.

Dadonghai sunset

 
I stayed in a hotel overlooking Dadonghai beach in the eastern part of Sanya city. The beach was always crowded with vacationers, most of them Chinese, sitting under beach umbrellas supplied by the modern resorts lining the beach. Along the beach is an assortment of seaside entertainments: parasailing, scuba diving, jet skiing, paddleboating, sailing, powerboating. It felt more like Miami Beach than the People’s Republic of China but I loved being by the sea, on a warm, tropical beach.

My favorite feature of Dadonghai was the seafood. Outdoor restaurants all over Sanya sell live seafood out of tanks with constantly circulating seawater: clams and cockles and crabs of several types, scallops, oysters, shrimp, spiny lobsters, sea urchins, pompano, puffer fish, groupers and other fish species I couldn’t identify; even cuttlefish, skates, and moray eels. I wondered what a moray eel tastes like but wasn’t curious enough to pony up the $20 a kilo to find out.


Live seafood tanks


Your choice of a meal is netted out of a tank and -- if a fish -- dispatched unceremoniously by being bashed on the pavement before it is carried off to the kitchen. A few minutes later dinner appears. It’s not cheap: shrimp run 45 RMB or about $7 a kilo, shrimp about $8, and a decent-size fish can cost the equivalent of $30. But the fish restaurants, most owned by people from China’s northern provinces, were always crowded with free-spending Chinese visitors.

Seafood dinner

Hainan is also known for its vast assortment of tropical fruit, not only the predictable mangos and papayas but dragon fruit, star fruit, jack fruit, custard apple, aumand, pitaya, a hairy red fruit called simply hong mao dan or “red hair” fruit, something called “mountain bamboo” that looks like a big acorn, and lianwu, a small, crunchy fruit shaped like a bell.


Fruit stand

 When not eating, I traveled around Sanya and to nearby places, though any traveling during the Spring Festival Season can be difficult. The buses to get to a place are crowded with tourists and people going about their business. One fellow got on a bus I was on carrying a box labeled “Whistling Artillery Shells,” which he casually placed at my feet.

Then the place itself is crowded, and the return bus trip can be a nightmare since so many people want to leave at the same time. My first out of town trip was to the Nanshan temple, 25 miles west of town. I had no difficulty getting a bus there, but when I was ready to head back there was massive line of people waiting for the one city bus to Sanya.


Nanshan warning

Order appeared to break down completely as people began to bolt the line and rush incoming buses, banging on their doors to gain entrance. One driver unwisely opened his door, his bus promptly filling with line jumpers. Nevertheless, many others remained patiently in line as a policemen went over to the invaded bus with its panicky passengers and ordered it to pull aside. There it sat, and may still be sitting for all I know.

Meanwhile, those who’d remained in line were ushered on to the appropriate bus. Still, there was pushing and shoving there as well. One elderly man trying to get on the bus was repeatedly shoved aside until I got fed up and, as the tallest person on hand, barred others’ way so he could get on. The policeman, standing on the bus’s top step, said to me, in English, “Thank you.”

Nanshan Bodhisattva

Nanshan was a bit of a frost: there was a $20+ admission cost to what’s called a “Buddhist preaching site,” but the Buddhist temple is a 1998 creation full of dubious replicas and “treasures” such as a Guanyin statue said to contain 100 kilos of gold and silver and 120 carats of South African diamonds. The grounds are nice but unspectacular; they face on a beach that has a giant contemporary statue, also of the Guanyin Bodhisattva. A stone leading to the beach offers to visitors the wise warning, “For your safety, please don’t go to sea,” presumably meaning “No Swimming.” The place is an example of the manufactured “tourism zones” cropping up around the country, aimed at Chinese tourists.

Barbecuing fish, Yalong Bay

My next visit was to Yalong Bay, east of Sanya, a crowded beach facing a naval base. My enduring memory of Yalong is the lunch of coconut milk and barbecued fish I had there, the fish cooked slowly over coals with a crisp, rich, coating of spices I couldn’t identify.

Another day I visited Five Finger Mountain, outside the city of Wuzhishan. The bus route runs beside the long Sanya beach, lined with elaborate resorts, each trying to outdo the other in feats of postmodern architectural exuberance. My favorite example was Dadonghai’s Bao Hong hotel with its “International Club,” a neo-classical dome at one end and bas-relief panels putatively depicting minority folk tales at the other.

Postmodern neoclassical international
Chinese ethnic minority architecture

Five Finger Mountain offered an enjoyable, unhurried walk through a rain forest and a chance to visit a small village and its rice paddies. In the absence of national treasures, it was inexpensive and uncrowded.

My last out of town visit was to Tianya-Haijiao “Scenic Area,” also west of Sanya, another tourist trap touted as “the most romantic tropical paradise of China.” For foreigners, the advertising hype for Tianya-Haijiao, meaning “edge of the sky, rim of the sea,” is almost more interesting than the place itself: Miss World contests have been held there, along with the “New Silk Road Model Contest” and the “International Wedding Festival.” For Chinese people, it has significance as “the end of the earth,” where lovers are prepared to go to meet each other. Next to it was another park which identified itself as “Sanya Greatest World of Love.”

Tianya-Haijao, the end of the world

Most of my time, though, I stayed in Dadonghai, swam in the hotel pool or walked on the beach. One afternoon I visited Sanya’s long, hard sand beach -- uncrowded, spacious, shaded by palm trees and used by local people while tourists jam Dadonghai’s smaller beach -- and inspected its waterfront, wondering if the wealthy in China have taken up boating. Indeed yachts are anchored in the harbor, but most have the logos of companies, and are perhaps intended for company outings or rental.


Sanya Beach

 And I ate at fish restaurants until I tired of seafood and began to seek out restaurants with Russian names and menus offering dishes like “Habenular speculation the new pull-chip” (flat noodles with red and green peppers), or “Dried meat floss cuisine folder land fire” (bread with meat filling). Food, a constant source of interest and amusement in China.

I was going home from downtown Wuhan on a bus last night around dinner time when the driver stopped the bus, hopped off and went into a small restaurant. He took his time, scrutinizing each item while the bus chugged, gurgled and beeped and his passengers waited patiently. No one grumbled at being kept waiting, everyone understood. It was dinner time. My favorite bakery in Dadonghai sold a pastry which boasted on its label that it was “baked to the music of Mozart.” One day I developed a craving for potato chips, but the only potato chips available in Sanya – Lay’s at that – were in flavors: Blueberry, French Chicken, Cucumber and … Lamb.


Yachts in Sanya harbor



Five finger mountain and rice paddies