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Sanya . . . oh Matt and I had a lot to learn about traveling and it would appear that Sanya is the place for us to learn it. We were in a random town waiting the arrival of our train, we had a good few hours to wait, so as you may recall I was in an internet cafe, just passing the time. We then took a lesuirely strole, grabbed some lunch and then picked up our luggage that we had securely left at the train station. Now I read other peoples blogs, one of which is Katy and Rob's blog, two fellow TTC's who are placed in Shenghan, north of China. Anyway in thier blog Rob told us that he nearly missed his train because of the amount of train stations there are in Beijing, and he went to the wrong one.
Luckily for Matt and I, we were in the remotest of places so therefore should only have one train station. I can hear you all cry . . . "idiots, check the ticket" as you will have guessed, we were clearly mistaken. This random out of the way town, actually had 2, yes 2 train stations. Matt and I had killed time, buying snacks for the train, looking around the area and then looking at the board, why wasn't our train number featured, and why were there no trains even heading in that direction. Like Rob, instinct took over, and of we went to find a taxi to take us to the correct place. You'd think, after reading the near miss of a train to someone else that we would be more careful, well we weren't. After a 40 min taxi ride, 60 yuan lighter, and having seen a great deal of country side (why they would have a station this remote, god only knows) but we made it with 10 mins to spare, safely on our train to the island of Hainan. A train to an island, Matt and I had placed our bets, "a tunnel to the island" I said, "a bridge" said Matt, "a train ferry" said the man sitting opposite us. "a train ferry" - yep our train went on a ferry that took us to the island, a very choppy ferry i may add, one that resulted, once more in me removing all contents from my stomach, great times.
Eventually we made it safely to Sanya, south of the island. We had booked ourselves into a nice apartment hostel for the night, as it was the only one with rooms for the night, and our intention was the next day try find another cheaper hostel for the rest of our stay. After searching for what seemed like hours the next day we eventually stumbled upon the hostel area, "no room at the inn" the more places we tried the less hopefully we were getting . . . we even joked that worse case scenerio was that we would buy a tent and sleep on the beach. This became no laughing matter, however a slightly better option became available through one of the hostels, we could rent a tent, so armed with some blankets, poles, tent and most importantly a bottle of cheap vodka we set up camp.
This was in the hostel region, called Dadonghai, you wouldn't believe that we were in China, one might think oddly that we were in Russia. We have never had problems in China before, everyone has been more than friendly and since in Changsha we were some of the few Westerners, we were a novelty. Not here in Sanya, I was often spoken to in Russian, as they assume that a westener here would be, was slightly offened, however all westerners look the same to the Chinese. Any ways, after too much russian vodka, a midnight swim it was off to bed.
"Where's my bag" is what I was woken up too, Matt's bag was no longer in the tent, we found it not far down the beach, minus his ipod and 500yuan, luckily they left the actual wallet with his cards in it, but all the money was gone. My bag lay untouched back in the tent . . . another hard learnt lesson though.
So back to the drawing board, another day spent looking for accommodation. We did get to see a lot of the town this way, search endlessly for a place to stay, however it did become tiring and with the hot sun beating down, made carrying my heaving rucksack near impossible. Luckily Haidy, our Chinese friend from Changsha was coming down to visit us in Hainan and she found us a cheap hostel in a small village just outside of Dadonghai.
So on our third day in Sanya, Matt and I, with Haidy, actually managed to see some of Sanya without our luggage, this was the 4th largest statue in the world, a female buddha, was good, and glad we went but weather was so hot, got burnt (but was wearing suncream) and after our adventures so far, we just weren't really in the mood, and assuming matt had the same opinion I did, the sooner we were out of Sanya the better. However we had booked flights out of the island, as these were just as cheap as the train, so we had a fourth day to kill before our 8 o'clock flight to Guangzhou. This involved us going to Halong Bay, the most touristy beach I think I have ever been too, was not impressed at all, Dadonghai was much nicer, even though it has theives. Back to the hostel, which also has beach on its door step, literally, only thing broken glass around so wasn't to safe, pity because it could have been really nice.
Plane left and arrived in Guangzhou, where we plan to stay for couple of days.
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