Sanya

Coworker Dave and I decided to take a quick visit to the island paradise of Sanya this weekend. Sanya is located in Hainan Province, which is an island on the southernmost tip of China. It was described to us as "The Hawaii of China." I've never been to Hawaii, but if it's cloudy and rainy and very green, then I guess it's the same. It was pretty cloudy and overcast Friday, Saturday, and Sunday morning. Sunday afternoon was absolutely beautiful, though. Extremely sunny and bright. And I guess I don't learn well. After the visit to Miami, you think I'd understand what sunscreen was for. I was only in the sun for 30-45 minutes, and I burned like a mofo. Not as bad as Dave, however.

We originally decided to go down because flights are 900RMB, or about $120 round trip. There aren't a lot of sights near Sanya, but one cool thing we heard about was Hao Dao, or Monkey Island. Imagine an island with over 1000 monkeys, without bears nearby.
They had some of the monkeys doing tricks:
Then there was monkey jail, outside of which one of the monkeys became enamoured with Dave.
Near Monkey Island is a small town called Xincun. It's a harbor town, as you'll see. We took some time to just stroll thru the town and the market area. One of the most intersting things to do in any town is just walk the streets. You end up seeing things that are hard to comprehend from our standpoint. It's also a lot of fun trying to interact with the locals (sometimes, that is).
Saturday was spent just walking thru Sanya itself. I don't have a lot of pictures, mostly because we were just enjoying it. We of course ran across street vendors of all sorts.
There must be lots of Russian visitors to Sanya, because there were lots of signs like this. Many were Russian first, then Chinese, then English.
Sunday was just relaxing. So I'll leave you with pictures of 7.5 km worth of white sand beach. Yes, I brought some home!
Hopefully the upcoming weekend has a trip to Hong Kong, if just for a day. So maybe I'll get some more pics for you all.