Labour Day came and with it, a week’s holiday from school. Julia and I packed our bags and jumped on a plane to the tropical ffice:smarttags" />island of Hainan. I would just like to say, before I go any further, that I was not really fair to Julia in my earlier blog. I should make it clear that she’s not really very posh, that is just something people started calling her. She’s very lovely. So when the holidays came and our friends jetted off to Thailand to do whatever it is young men like to do in Thailand, Julia and I went off on an adventure of our own.

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Hainan’s nickname is “China’s Hawaii” as it is an island on the same latitude as Hawaii. It’s therefore very very hot. After a night in the capital, Haikou, we took some buses to a beach. Fred had been there in the Spring Festival holiday, and all we had to follow was his scribbled memory of what buses to take to what towns and villages, and I felt slightly worried on the way that this was crazy and we had no idea where we were going and what if he was playing a joke on us? We were in the middle of nowhere and the rickety old minibus had gone from being packed full to being occupied by only one man other than ourselves. We got to the last stop, at the end of a dirt road, and jumped off to find that at least we had arrived at the sea. As we walked through the palms at the top of the beach, an old woman with a typical Chinese conical sun hat and a huge smile drifted towards us. She pointed us in the direction of a hotel, and called to a little man to lead the way. We weaved through trees and little huts, over a lawn, and suddenly were faced with a large conference hotel which looked very out of place. Luckily, they had a free room for us. In fact, they seemed to have all their rooms free, so we got 50% off, and then after dropping off our bags, we made our way back to the beach to sit with the smiling old woman and drink from coconuts.

The next day, we took a funny little vehicle to a nearby town where we boarded a ferry for a peninsula with a massive coconut palm plantation. Again, we took a bus to the end of its route, but this time with no directions to follow, and even less idea of where we were trying to get to. It was very beautiful along the way, very South-East Asian, and so far away from the smog of Chongqing. People dozed in hammocks between the trees, and called to each other in their strange Hainan language. We were happy (and surprised) to find, when we got off the bus, that we had got to within 5 minutes walk of a beach, so made our way there and spent the rest of the day swimming in the sea and lazing on the sand, with no worries in the world apart from how badly we would be hurt if a coconut fell on our heads.

After a couple of nights at Gaolong Bay, we managed, surprisingly easily, to find a bus going to a town in the centre of the island where we thought we’d spend a night or two. The bus took us along red sandy roads through Hainan’s lush countryside, and I sat contentedly chatting with some locals, and gazing out of the window with the wind in my face. It was not until we arrived in Qiongzhong that I discovered that, sitting by the window, I had become completely covered in sand from the road, and my hair was bright orange as were my eyebrows and I looked very scary. Qiongzhong was quite a nice town, with colourful tropical fruits being sold at stalls all along the streets, and practically nothing on the roads other than millions of motocabs. In the first hotel we came to, we managed to get ourselves a suite of bedroom, living room and bathroom for about a fiver, and thought we were doing very well, until we realised later on that we were right next door to a night club, and the music was so loud that it may as well have been coming full blast from our own room. However, the club seemed to close at 11, so all was well. The next day we went for a walk and you can read about it at Walking Stories if you so desire.

Our next destination was the Jiafengling Nature Reserve. The guide book indicated a very long way round to get there, but we managed to find a bus that cut through to the right kind of area, rather than going down to the south and around the coast, so we got on it. It was a sleeper bus and felt like the most dangerous bus ever invented, but I guess that most buses in China feel like they’re about to fall apart, so we probably weren’t in any more danger on this one than on any other we’d taken so far. At the destination, we were told there were no more buses to where we wanted to go, but we managed to find one going in the right direction so we got on it. The driver was very friendly and when we got to the town, he helped us find a hotel. This one was less than £2 for our room, which was good, but then again if we wanted to go to the toilet we had to go out onto the balcony behind a sheet of tin, and if we wanted to shower we had to throw a bucket of water over ourselves on the balcony, so I guess it’s not really surprising it was cheap. The town was fun, with pigs walking about all over the place munching on anything they could find, and also when we walked about in the evening we saw a woman with an upside-down dead dog that was on fire (there was no barbecue or bonfire, just the dog, on fire). At night, I couldn’t sleep and ended up being glad, as after lying awake for a few hours, I heard a strange noise, and then a thud beside me, when I screamed and switched the light on, to find a huge ginormous black bug on my pillow. I thought it was a cockroach, and it looked like one, and maybe it was one, I don’t know, but it was not a nice thing to have on my pillow. I’m very glad I wasn’t asleep. Imagine I'd had my mouth open and it’d fallen into my mouth instead of onto my pillow! Eurgh.

The next day we took another bus through the lovely countryside, and then a motorbike sidecar up the hill to the nature reserve. With the two of us and our rucksacks in the sidecar, the motorbike was having a lot of trouble, so when our driver’s friend came past on a motorbike, Julia went onto that and we eventually managed to get up the hill. Unfortunately, all of the accommodation at the reserve was full. Fortunately, the reserve manager said we could sleep on the floor of the conference hall. Stupidly, we didn’t ask him how much money he wanted for that, and the next morning he asked for a ridiculous amount, and I was too tired to argue, so that ended up being probably the most annoying part of the whole holiday. However, we had a lovely time at the reserve. It says in all the books that it’s a rainforest, but with no rain it wasn’t very rainforest-like, just like a forest really, with many insects. We had a bit of a walk, and swam in the lake in the evening and again first thing in the morning, and it was great.

Last part of the holiday, and we were back to the beach. This time, it was China’s most popular beach resort, and there were quite a lot of people there. We had a couple of days relaxing, trying to swim in the sea (and not really succeeding, due to the crazy waves and currents), drinking coconut milk, and eating lots of good fish and shellfish. The flight back wasn’t the most fun of flights. For me, taking a plane is never fun, but it was made even worse when we found out that we had to stop off somewhere on the way, and therefore take off twice. They had craftily joined some flights together, and didn’t even bother to tell us. And then, I left my fancy electronic dictionary on the plane when we left. Silly me. But anyway, we had had a good holiday, and I was back, all ready to face the last 3 weeks of my contract.