Baoting, Hainan Island, China

Our next stop was Baoting where we had decided to treat ourselves to a few days at a thermal resort complete with hot pools.

We managed to find the bus without incident, traveled the 3 hours and negotiated a taxi with our trusty Chinese translations to the resort.

The resort was as we had hoped was very classy and we had a wonderful view from our room of the five fingers mountain. We were happy to find a young man working at the hotel who spoke English well which made our stay easy.

We spent most of our time relaxing around the resort and enjoying our own private hot tub on our deck—what decadence!!

Menus once again were only in Chinese but with help from a Chinese tourist who spoke a little English we had a lovely beef chili dish and a bowl of mixed steamed vegetables our first night. Feeling adventurous the next night we ordered something else and were presented with a dish consisting of a lot of bones with a minimal amount of meat attached and a plate of what appeared to be steamed weeds—hmm. The following night we reverted to our first choice. The weed like greenery was still the base of the vegetable dish but at least was supplemented with other things—other than mushrooms we were unable to identify most things!!

We went into the town one day and found that here as everywhere we have been is in the throes of “lifestyle’ development. Huge numbers of classy high rise apartments are being built and advertised as a “sunny lifestyle” choice. One would hope that China does not sink into the recession which has plagued the rest of the world as there will be a massive number of empty half-finished high rise complexes all over Hainan.

The city centre is clean and well planned with a huge amount of money spent promoting the art and culture of the minority tribal people from this region.

We came across what looked to have been a temple which turned out to have been made into a tea house so we had a lovely hour being served tea in the traditional manner as two young women played music on their traditional instruments. They did not speak any English but were very smiley—we had found that despite the area being a major tourist region it is only visited by Chinese tourists. In fact once we had left Sanya which is full of Russians we had not seen a white face at all.

We definitely prefer these smaller towns and have enjoyed our experience since leaving Sanya.