One month of traveling and three thousand pictures later – still much left to explore.
Want to skip right to the photos for part 1? Click here.
The beginning of February was the mid-year break between semesters at my school and in schools across mainland China. Oh being a teacher is nice during these holidays! And because all of my students had exams for which they would be studying two weeks before the break, my spring holiday started on January 14th!
First stop – time to warm up my winter1 chilled bones in China’s Hawaii – Hainan. But instead of being filled with American and Japanese tourists like the former, the city of Sanya in southern Hainan is filled to the brim with Chinese and Russians. I wasn’t quite expecting this and was much surprised when I arrived to see all the restaurant signs in Russian and Chinese, though there several were also in English.
I stayed at Blue Sky Hostel there near the beach in Sanya, and I spent my first two days exploring the beach, sipping coconut milk from the shell, and eating my favorite of Chinese cuisine – an assortment of things from the nighttime food stalls lining the streets. I am convinced that the less washed a wok is, the more flavorful and delicious the dish will be.
Not too far from Sanya, two hours via bus, half hour by a scammy-motorbike escort, and a fifteen-minute cable car ride, there is a little peninsula called Monkey Island. (Sanya to Lingshui to Xincun to Monkey Island) And you guessed it, filled to the brim with rhesus monkeys. There you can watch hundreds of little monkeys playing in fields, babies playing tag while jumping from vine to tail to vine, and heaps of wiser older monkeys trying to steal things from tourists. It is sort of a monkey sanctuary, the monkeys having been raised originally for research though I am not sure if that is done anymore. Now some of the monkeys are engaged in different shows: monkeys doing a flag raising ceremony as people pass by, monkeys on bicycles, monkeys going odd slapstick comedy acts, or a monkey doing a handstand on top of the horns of a mountain goat that is balancing on the top of a small can that is balancing on top of a rope suspended between two poles. Yeah, it was strange – somehow totally wrong –but also kinda hilarious.
In the middle of Hainan is Wuzhishan2 (五指山) – or Five Finger Mountain, and is surrounded by rainforest. Though not quite teaming with life, the visit was interesting and I enjoyed a leisurely and picturesque hike through the forest. I went with a fellow traveler that I met in the hostel, and we stayed overnight in the small town of Wuzhishan. The day after exploring the forest we visited an area called the Seven Fairy Hot Springs, arriving just a bit too late to enjoy the actual hot springs. Still it was pretty cool and along the way we were able to observe a few of the minority villages still in existence on Hainan, the local Li and Miao peoples. In a bit of a cluster*&!# we barely made it back to Sanya that night, catching the last departing bus just in time.
The next day I decided to wander off to the beach myself and soak in some sun and sand and take more pictures of supposedly the only real swimmable beach in China. Walking to a beach that was a bit further away, I passed by several small shops and got my fair share of strange looks from people. Still on my way to the beach I was strolling pretty close to the road, lazily hanging onto my bag in left hand, when two men on a motorbike approached and the man on the back yanked my bag from my hand – but I yanked back much harder. And then, filled with astonishment and rage, started shouting at them full volume. Soo not cool. They sped off quickly, with no prize for their efforts, and I tried to calm myself back down. A young army guy who had observed this from afar rode up on his bicycle and I sensed by his look he was checking if I was okay. This was confirmed when I started speaking with him in Chinese and he told me I should have punched them! I agreed, and I thanked him for his concern, but at the same time somehow I knew that wasn’t how I wanted to start an international incident.
That night I relaxed at the hostel and found a few new people there to eat with and later taking a stroll on deserted nighttime beach. Staying up all that night, it was dawn before I realized the time, and slept not a wink before heading off to the airport for the next leg of my trip.
… next up: Yunnan Province
1 My first winter without snow, and hardly a day below zero. So by Minnesota standards, it was pretty mild, but with enough moisture in the frozen windy air to chill you through and through.
2 Evidently Wuzhishan is the smallest city in China, not that it was really that tiny, but only that it actually has the status of ‘city.’