Baoa, Hainan Island, China

We left Baoting and caught the fast train to Boao, our next destination. The town is on the shores of the South China Sea and is yet one more place in Hainan where development is at a rapid rate. It is the permanent site of a huge Asian forum every year and obviously a lot of money comes into the city from that.

We negotiated our way to the hostel we were booked into. This turned out to be in a very old quaint building full of old photos, memorabilia and furniture and is attached to a little coffee shop which they also run.

We found a KFC look-a-like place and gratefully ate dinner there which enabled us to avoid the dining experience. Breakfast was at a local restaurant where the options were a doughy bun or noodles swimming in broth. We subsequently found yoghurt sold at the nearby grocery store and had that with fruit—a much better option.

We rented bicycles for the day as finally we felt we could compete with the traffic. As we left the city we saw a parking lot filled with tourist buses and after investigating found that they were dressing busloads of people into life jackets and putting them on plastic chairs on rafts which were connected together and pulled into the river for a circle ride. We continue to be astonished at what local tourists find fun!!!

We, on the other hand continued to bike through the small lanes which wind their way through the countryside with almost no traffic so it was lovely to bike through little villages.

People were tending the amazing crops of almost all kinds of vegetables which grow in abundance and the inevitable rice paddies. As we passed people they smiled and responded to our greeting of Nihau—our language skills are really limited!!

One stop was at a heritage house of one of the original setters and the warren of houses and buildings amazed us. In true Asian fashion families just build onto existing buildings as they expand.

At one village it was obvious that several families were helping build a house and we stopped to watch for a while. As they saw us they beckoned us to join them and have tea and cookies. Of course they spoke no English but it was one of those special moments in foreign travel where a connection is made and everyone enjoys the experience. The old ladies insisted we sat with them out of the sun and were happy for us to take photos. As we departed we gave balloons which we carry for such occasions to the children nearby—international relations could be improved with more of these meetings with just regular people having no hidden agendas.

We hired Mr Cai for the following day to take us to Le Cheng Island to an important Buddhist Temple in his motorized tuk tuk and enjoyed driving more of the rural lanes.
Our last day we visited the huge temple close to the town and compared the happy fat Buddha's to the slender Myanmar Buddha's--not sure of the significance. 

The Australian Open tennis tournament was on and we had watched the first few games in Baoting and after asking at the hostel they took us into their coffee shop where they set up the TV and we watched the rest of the games with Chinese commentary—it was pretty cool.

We had intended travelling by night train to make our way back to Hong Kong but upon enquiry found that everything was booking up fast and prices were escalating. It was the start of the 40 day celebration of Chinese New Year and we feared being stranded somewhere. We cut our time short in China and booked a flight from Sanya to Hong Kong where we would spend 10 days before our flight to Auckland, New Zealand. We caught the fast train back to Sanya which travels quietly and smoothly at almost 200km an hour--painless!!

Although we had not enjoyed the first part of our travels in the busy cities of Hainan the last part in the smaller centres were more enjoyable despite the language issues and in retrospect we were happy to have experienced China.