Happy New Year of the Rabbit everyone! On Saturday I returned from exactly one month of travelling in the Chinese Spring Festival. It’s been a month of ups and downs - it was fantastic to visit lots of good bits of China but frustrating because people kept stealing my stuff. More on this later.
I started the holiday with 2 weeks in Sanya with my best Chinese friend, Lydia. Sanya is a city on the southern coast of Hainan, the tropical island province of China. It was possibly the only city in China to have sun in January and it was pretty idyllic.
Lydia had invited me to stay with her and her grandparents who have a house there and I wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity for a beach holiday with free accommodation.
However, what I needed more than a beach holiday was a break from Pingxiang and, unfortunately, Lydia’s grandparents’ place was a little too close to ‘home’ (and the airport). So much so, in fact, that the block of flats we were staying in had been nicknamed ‘Pingxiang town’ because they had all been sold to Pingxiang people. I did not appreciate being recognised by the daily mahjong players. Nor did I really appreciate the wild dogs, or the buckets of fish in the bathroom, or the fact that I was the only white person in the area.
So I took a little break in a hostel down on Dadonghai beach for a few nights. It was exactly what I needed – I met loads of Westerners, ate a lot of Western food and almost forgot I was in China. What I didn’t really need was my purse being stolen one night, along with my Chinese bank card which, as it turns out, can’t be cancelled, but has to be 'suspended' every 5 days until you return to the exact bank at which it was issued. Whoever came up with that ingenius banking concept deserves a medal.
After I was done cursing and resenting China I got on with enjoying my holiday. So, here's an overview of my January time in Sanya…
Most days it was sunny, and a balmy 20 something degrees. We went to the beach a lot.
Lydia, my new German friend Florian and I visited Yanoda, a rainforest reserve centre just north of Sanya. We had a pretty good time climbing up streams, walking in the rainforest and taking pictures of each other taking pictures.
Yanoda apparently meant both 'Hello' and '1,2,3' in the local dialect, and everytime we saw anybody they would shout 'Yanoda!' in our faces. It got a little annoying, but then we started shouting 'Yanoda!' at them before they could and that was much more fun.
Here I am on a rock.
Back at the Pingxiang compound, Lydia and I met a Chinese guy called Dan who had studied in Melbourne for 6 years and spoke English in a very confusing Australian accent. We went with confusingly Australian-sounding Dan to Ximao Island, on the most beautiful day of the trip. Me and Lyd rode a tandem bike around the island, which was probably the most fun I have ever had.
There was also a giant stone bull.
One day Florian invited me out with him and our 2 Dutch friends from the hostel to go motorbiking/scootering up the coast. I don’t think my life has ever been threatened in such a serious and exhilarating way. The Chinese don’t really do helmets or any kind of protection, and me and Florian’s scooter was held together by tape. It was fantastic. We spent most of the day driving around, stopping on different beaches when we felt like it.
I went out quite a bit with my multicultural hot pot of hostel friends. Everyone fulfilled their racial stereotypes to perfection; the French smoked a lot and occasionally proposed, the Americans expressed unending and unnecessary opinions and the Swedish cut extravagant shapes on the dance floor to bad music. It was a lot of fun.Other activities included a day at the incredible Nantian Hot Springs, shopping, cycling to Yalong bay, breaking my camera, an impromptu banquet with Lydia’s grandparents and friends, riding the least safe local buses ever, spraining an ankle, discovering a nudist colony on the beach and eating way too much. One day it was cloudy and cold so Lydia and I literally just ate our way around Sanya for the whole day. We even found an international supermarket where I sourced Kettle Chips.
All in all (and theft aside) it was a great couple of weeks, though by the end I was ready to move on. I would later discover that Sanya wasn't quite done with me yet, but on the 1st February I said goodbye to Lydia and flew to Guangzhou for part 2 of the great Spring Festival adventure…
