28/1/13 - 5/2/13

First impressions of Sanya weren't brilliant: it was very grey, very rainy and the area we arrived at was pretty ugly too. The area surrounding our hostel was better, with less skyscrapers and more palm trees, but we were still only metres from a huge main road and I was still worried that this wasn't quite the Chinese Hawaii we'd been promised. We were all desperate for showers, but as our rooms weren't ready yet we set out in search of the beach instead, which turned out to be a three minute walk from the hostel. We lasted about a minute on the beach before Mary, Hannah and I ran to paddle in the sea... and about another two minutes before we dumped all of our valuables on Jony and started wading into the sea, deeper and deeper, until finally there was nothing for it but to dunk our heads under and start swimming. When we finally staggered out of the sea about 10 minutes later, we were all about 3 stone heavier in our wet clothes, and looking odd and bedraggled enough to justify all the stares we were getting. We continued our walk regardless, and looped back to the hostel through town, via several banks, all of whom I'm sure were delighted to be left with huge puddles beside their ATMs.

Luckily, the first day was our worst, weather-wise. The rain had slackened off by the time we went for our walk, and we never saw it again; every day was warm and sunny, and some were absolutely scorching. The evening of the first night, we tried to go for a nice meal together at a good restaurant. We ordered kebabs, egg-fried rice, roasted eggplant and a fried pigeon from the menu, then watched incredulously as the price:size ratio was revealed. The pigeon (well, we're not sure it was a pigeon, but we saw one of the cooks go outside and return with a live one in his fist about 10 minutes before our meal was served, and we were the only customers, so it seems a fair guess) was smaller than both my fist and the picture in the menu - we passed it around, nibbling gingerly at it, before giving up and going to share an enormous mound of kebabs at a cheap Muslim restaurant near the beach. After our meal, we wandered down to the beach to watch the lights (and adverts) playing on the buildings of Phoenix Island, then set about finding our way home, which proved so much of a hassle that we eventually caved and paired up for motorcycle taxi rides home.

Now, I'm writing all of this quite a while after it happened so my memory of it all is already starting to jumble. Instead of trying to cover each day exactly, I'm going to write about Sanya in terms of the different things we did - that way it doesn't matter if I get my dates mixed up, and I won't miss anything important. So:

Booked tickets home
Not an exciting one, but important anyway! I needed to be back in Jiujiang by the 6th, to meet with a different group of friends to continue my travelling, but there were no tickets available for any routes home. I had a very stressful conversation in Chinese with the guy at the ticket office, whilst an enormous queue built up behind me, full of people trying to barge to the front to help the stupid English girl buy her tickets so it would all hurry up. In the end, the ticket guy started looking up tickets from Sanya, to Beijing, to Jiujiang, which is just ridiculous, so I rang Julie for help. Julie was an absolute life-saver: she found me a travel agent's right next door to the train station and spoke with the woman there, managing to book me one of the two remaining tickets on a flight from Sanya to Nanchang. She even offered to pay for my ticket if I had trouble withdrawing enough money from my account. The flight was obscenely expensive - I don't even want to say how much it cost! but at that point I couldn't find any other way of getting home.

Surfing!
We arranged this through our hostel, and the owner of our hostel was our guide/teacher for the surfing too. Only me, Mary and Hannah were actually going surfing, but he kicked other guests out of his minibus so all six of us could travel together to the surfing beach. The surfing beach was perfect: white sand, blue sea, really empty and supplied with a beach bar where we could lounge on beanbags and order chips. We came back here a couple of times, although our first visit was the only time we surfed. The other times, we built sandcastles, swam, sunbathed, dozed on the beanbags and ate a record-breaking number of Cornettos. But, surfing! In the end, only Mary and I actually went surfing and, at first, we were both pretty terrible. The American couple we were learning with were already riding small waves before we'd even mastered jumping onto our boards, and for most of the morning we were really only body-boarding. I somehow ended up sat sidesaddle on my board every time I tried to stand up and we were both thrown head-first into the sea more times than I can count. We did get better though! By lunchtime, I'd stood up (and fallen straight back off) quite a few times, and Mary had managed to stay standing on her board for long enough to win a bet with Jono and earn herself a drink. In the afternoon, we both managed to stand up for the duration of our waves quite a lot. We'd asked the others to come down and try to get some photos of us surfing, and at one point we were both riding the same wave in, metres apart from each other and metres away from where the others were stood with the camera on the beach. We both shouted and waved for them to turn around and get a photo of this special moment... but no, they were distracted in taking as many photos of Chinese men's moobs as possible and didn't even see us. The downside of surfing was that me and Mary both got very, very sunburnt. We had lovely solid lines across our arms and legs from our shortie wetsuits, and both of our faces were gloriously red. Mary was even worse off than me, as she got some sort of allergic reaction to the sun and her whole face swelled up like a pillow for about 3 days.

Mountain climb & the jungle waterfall
This was mine, Hannah's and Jony's attempt at being sporty, active outdoor types. We had to be up early for a 3hr minibus ride to __ National Park. The first 2hrs of this journey were spent crammed in the back seat, so when Chris told us to switch seats with the group sat in front of us I was delighted... until he added that it would be harder for the bus to get up the mountain if the heaviest people were at the back. Rude! Potential insults aside, we made it to the starting point of our trek and started gearing up for the hike. It was a really beautiful day with barely any clouds and a burning blue sky, so the views were brilliant. The whole ascent had been built up with stairs - first shallow stone steps, then steep wooden stairs - which probably made the climb a little easier, but it was still hard work. Stone markers telling you how far you'd come were set at intervals along the route: 400m, 600m, 800m... then we reached the hardest part and spent 15 minutes labouring up zig-zags of the steepest stairs yet, only to be greeted with a marker claiming the same 800m mark on the other side. We walked (climbed) for some time more and hit a 600m marker, at which point I began fuming and complaining about how demotivational it all was. I'd been moaning about it for too long before I realised that the markers were now counting down until we reached the summit! Jony and I had made a bet when we started climbing about who would reach the top first, so as we got closer to the top I started plotting how to win. Obviously I didn't say anything about the bet, in case he'd forgotten, instead slyly trying to make sure I was a step or two in front and blocking the way. Then I saw the bare sky behind the next flight of stairs, figured that this must be the final ascent and broke into a run. Jony started running behind me, but I had a good head start and was feeling confident... until I reached the top of those stairs, saw another, larger, flight stretching before me and realised it had all been a cruel trick. I did manage to keep running up these stairs too, and I did manage to reach the top first, but it took me nearly two minutes of sitting, gasping, and sipping at water before I could breathe anything like normally again. After we'd taken some photos at the top of the mountain, Chris led us down a short way and into some tunnels that had been cut into the mountain. Apparently an army used to be stationed here to guard the mountain (why?), and he led us through to the other side of the mountain where we stood on a tiny balcony armoured in warning signs, from which they apparently fired their cannons (at who?). He also leapt out at me from behind a wall in the tunnels, making me shriek and jump about two foot in the air, which was apparently hilarious for everyone.

Next up was the 'waterfall climb', a further hour's drive away. We arrived at what looked like a spa resort and clattered off into the rainforest, crashing through weeds and thorns and climbing across fallen logs to cross a deep stream. The sun had disappeared behind a wall of cloud and it was actually quite chilly, so I was less than excited about the prospect of jumping into the pool beneath the waterfall. Quite rightly too, because when I finally goaded myself into jumping from a huge boulder into the pool it was to spend the next minute screaming with cold and desperately thrashing about, trying to warm myself up. After a while, Hannah (Mc)manned up (Hannah's surname is Mcmann, so this is actually a really hilarious pun. You should aaalll be laughing) and joined me, and the two of us swam up to sit by the waterfall together. It was still very cold if you stopped moving for any length of time, but we were determined to make the most of our time at the waterfall. We kept ourselves warm with a variety of innovative games, such as "Guess which sea creature I am", in which you have to swim in the same way as a certain sea creature (amongst other things, we tried squid, whale, swordfish and, I think, plankton) and "Try climb the rock without using your hands". Time well-spent. Mid-way through this, Jony had ventured into the water himself, decided he hated it and sat huddled miserably on a rock.

The Sanya Scavenger Hunt
This was developed one evening to entertain us during the next day's bad weather. Basically, we compiled a list of ten tasks to complete as teams. Chris would judge which team completed each task the best, and the losing team would owe the winners a drink each. I'm aware that a few of my students have found my blog, and although I doubt they're still reading it, I'm going to skip out a couple of the tasks just in case. Instead, here is a selection of some of our tasks:

Stupidest thing bought for 5Y
Best 'owling' (this is where you crouch, like an owl, pulling an owl face, in a weird place. Obviously.)
Best 'awkward whale' (I thought this was a nationally known phenomena but apparently not. For those not in the know, an awkward whale is when, in an awkward situation, a person lies down on the ground and flails/spasms like a beached whale.)
Most money made busking in 10 minutes
Strangest place
Strangest person
Best thing to put in your mouth
Best photobomb

Teams were girls v boys, with each team confident that they would win. We spent the whole day running about Sanya, making fools of ourselves, documenting the whole experience for the judging later that day. I had to climb onto a table and 'owl' in the middle of Starbucks, Hannah had to climb into a cage full of melons, we all ran in and frolicked in the back of several tourists' photos, Mary thrashed about in the sea amidst all the paddling toddlers pretending to be a whale, Alice put a strange man's nose in her mouth, Mary a little baby's foot and I a snake... we haggled with a shopkeeper for a broken mannikin, crept into the window displays at the fancy department store, nearly got trapped in a tree we climbed for it's owling purposes and sang Justin Beiber whilst dancing the macarena by the roadside... after all this, we girls thought the odds of us winning looked good. Unfortunately, the boys' rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody at the bus station (which had them moved along by the police, twice) and Jony's awkward whale in a packed lift were too good to beat.

... and the rest of the time?
A lot of time was spent sleeping and sunbathing, and even more time was spent eating. We discovered some steamed dumplings we'd never seen before and a bar where we could buy amazing Western food at reasonably prices, and ate an unholy amount of both. A more-than-justifiable amount of time was spent in the international supermarket, gasping at cereal and playing hide-and-seek. One day, the girls led the boys in a two-hour search for a piercing parlour which eventually led us to a tiny bra shop, where we all had our ears pierced. We shared a dorm with a very strange American man named Jeff, who was as friendly as he was weird and slept with his hands up to his chin like a little squirrel and a huge open grin on his face. We were all mortally offended by another American guy we met at our hostel, who kept trying to make us and a group of French tourists admit that we hated each other and then insulting British food and our alleged over-use of baked beans. (What is wrong with baked beans?!) When our hostel held an all-you-can-eat buffet, we outdid every other guest by going back for seconds, thirds, fourths and for some, fifths. We were also embarrassed to discover that not everyone was as China-fied as us, and that we were the only table that had dumped their discarded chicken bones and other debris straight onto the table. I'm sure there's more that I've forgotten, but this is long enough already and I've several more places to write about still!

Ella xxx