Zai jian, Sanya
When I picked up my luggage in the Sanya airport around 8PM, I suddenly realized that for the first time ever in all the times I’ve been coming to China, no company-arranged car was meeting me! I wandered outside thinking there’s probably a coach to Yalong Bay where the hotel is, but if there was, its signage was only in Chinese and I can’t read many characters yet. A young man came up to me and offered to take me there for 160 yuan (about $23.50). I tried to talk him down just out of habit, but he said that a taxi would cost me 200. He looked clean and earnest, so what the heck. It was a pleasant hour’s drive and he played some of his favorite Chinese music for me. When I asked at the hotel what a cab would have cost, they said about 100 yuan. Oh, well. I’ll know next time.
Sylv was waiting at the door for me, somewhat anxiously, and she bought me a welcome home drink at the hotel bar. We had trouble talking to each other, though, because the Filipino band was so loud.
Tuesday was a day of rest; we just lounged around one of the many lovely pools. While I was away, Sylv had found a new secluded little nook. I couldn’t go in the water because of my Shanghai shin scrapes. I had the nurse look at them in the clinic here and only one required a little extra care and watching. She told me to stay out of the water for a day until she has another look at it tomorrow. She spoke zero English, but we managed to communicate just fine between my bits and pieces of Chinese and some good old-fashioned sign language.
The song of the chainsaw seems to have followed us here from Chapel Hill. They were cutting down palm trees on the hotel grounds that had grown up to block the views from some of the rooms. Stuff grows very fast here in the tropics. It was fun watching them work. One guy would walk up the tree trunk in his bare feet to attach a rope, then while the guy with the saw did his thing, the climber and a couple of other guys would pull on the rope to make the tree fall in the right direction. As it started to come down, they’d have to drop the rope and run for it, because the rope wasn’t long enough for them to be out of the range of the top foliage crashing to the ground! After the tree was down, they quickly cut it up into six-foot lengths which they lugged off on their shoulders while a bunch of cone-hatted women swooped in to gather up the fronds. They took the leaves away somewhere, probably to dry for future thatched-roof repairs – I’d seen dried foliage on frames near where just such work was going on. We also noticed the chefs from the kitchen picking up any fruit that had come down and also scavenging what may have been hearts of palm from the base. An hour after a tree was cut, no sign of it was left.
After we’d gone up to the apartment there was another big boom that shook the building, definitely not a tree coming down. It turned out that people were filling balloons with some sort of gas for a wedding party a few floors below us, and somebody lit a cigarette! We saw one guy being helped to the clinic, clutching his hand in obvious pain, and there was blood on the floor.
This is normally a peaceful place, but the noise didn’t stop today. In the evening an outdoor party started up two hotels down the beach with monster amplifiers. It was too loud in our room with the heavy glass sliding doors closed; what must it have been like around the pool at that hotel? Inconsiderate.
Wednesday, what started out to be a frustrating day ended beautifully. We tried to get the concierge to tell us about tours we might take to see more of Hainan (which is a bigger island than we’d thought, maybe 400 miles in diameter). None of the concierges seemed to know anything, though. They were really just bellhops doing desk duty. We finally decided to take a cab into the city of Sanya (a little less than an hour away) and just prowl around. The concierge of the moment suggested a restaurant we might try. Prowling the stalls on the “walking street,” we did find a few things we wanted, for which we probably overpaid by 50% or more. We tend to start negotiating at 25% off their opening offer, but old China hand friends say we should make our first counter offer for half or even two-thirds less than their “list” price. But it was hot and Sylv got tired soon enough.
We hailed a cab (no easy trick either) to the recommended restaurant, but found that they didn’t have an English menu, nor could anyone there speak English. The waiter suggested a Hainan special chicken dish which two women at the next table were sharing, but it looked awfully fatty. The wait staff had no other suggestions and sort of stood around uncomfortably talking to each other. We finally gave up and walked out. If the Chinese government wants to make Hainan their international tourist destination, they have a lot of training to do.
We got lucky in that a cab pulled up and let a bunch of people off (it looked like a clown car, so many folks got out!) so we grabbed it and set off for Yalong Bay and the Sheraton. We’d hit rush hour traffic and it was hot; also we had to drive around two separate car/motorcycle accidents and a truck loading junk that completely blocked a lane. Eventually we got “home” and decided to just eat in one of the hotel restaurants we hadn’t tried yet, an Asian fusion restaurant. I was in the mood for a Pad Thai, but Sylv ordered a sea bass. They brought the beautiful fish live, still gasping, for her inspection before they took it to the kitchen. That could have been a little off-putting, but it’s the custom here. You certainly know you’re getting fresh seafood.
It was a gorgeous evening. We sat out on the terrace listening to the distant surf while a little combo played gentle dinner music – harp, guitar and two girl singers. Suddenly we realized they were singing in Spanish. When we took a closer look at them, we saw that they weren’t Chinese as we had assumed; it turned out they were Paraguayan. We chatted with them at the bar during their break and told them we’d crossed over the border to Paraguay when we visited Iguassu Falls a couple of years ago, so they went and got their instruments and serenaded the two of us right there in the bar! Goodness knows what the Chinese waiters thought was going on.
Thursday morning I took my first-ever Yoga class. The teacher was a tiny Chinese without the proverbial ounce of fat on her. I’d always thought yoga looked sort of dopey. Au contraire, I was soon sweating buckets. I’ve never been very flexible even when I was in good shape and not running for so long has only made me even less so. Creak, groan! It’s a good workout – mostly about posture and stretching, it seems to me. I’ll see if I can do it on my own tomorrow. Can’t hurt, might help.
Thursday night we tried the Chinese restaurant in our hotel, but it was not a good experience. First, although they had a Planter’s Punch on the drink list, when Sylv ordered one, they had no clue how to make it. After a weird-tasting failed attempt and some confused conversation, we told them to forget it. Next, although we ordered our food off the menu and pointed to what we wanted, the waitress not only didn’t understand English, she didn’t seem to read Chinese either. Eventually we ordered a Hainan special chicken dish, which was flavorful, though not exactly what we’re used to. We’re spoiled in that we get skinless, boneless breasts at home. Here, they pluck and gut the chicken, lop off the feet to save for a special soup (and maybe the head too) and chop up what’s left with a cleaver. It gives “hacked chicken” an entirely different meaning! The result is that what you find in the pot includes fat, skin, bones, whole joints and God knows what else. Reminds me of an old Perdue commercial where a guy representing the competition kept repeating, “Parts is parts!” You can bust a tooth if you’re not careful.
Of course, the problem is that Westerners simply eat differently from Chinese and the hotel must have a heckuva hard job training some of these perhaps barely literate country people who come to work here as servers. We need to adjust our expectations, brand name hotel or not.
Friday I went walking to see what all the other hotels were like – not the Marriott, Hilton, and Ritz-Carlton chain hotels to the left, the Chinese ones to the right. Wow, there were a lot of them and eighty zillion people are here, thronging the beaches. There’s a major convention on, too – GSK China, celebrating their #1 market share in pharmaceuticals. They’ve taken over at least three hotels up the beach (with overflow groups in ours and in the Marriott) and the huge sound stage they’ve built a couple of hotels up is the source of all the loud noise we’ve been hearing in the evening.
Friday evening we went off campus to see how the rest of the world lives. We had dinner in the Japanese restaurant in the Marriott; very good food and much more competent service than we’d been experiencing at the Sheraton. The Marriott has a reputation for training its people very well; their reputation is intact.
To walk off dinner, we checked out a few more of the hotels – the Marriott, the Hilton and something called the Pullman (as in Pullman cars, do you suppose?). All impressive in their own ways, but we still prefer “our” Sheraton, which has by far the most beautiful grounds. It’s like living in a botanical garden.
Saturday we just lazed around. Sylv found yet another secluded little nook. We also discovered that they have two-fers in the afternoon, so we had a couple of Pina Coladas and tried to remember the Jimmy Buffet song.
We saved the best for last Saturday night. We had dinner on the moonlit terrace of an excellent Italian restaurant at the Ritz-Carlton, an elegant hotel so traditional in its architecture that it makes us think of Beijing. The service was impeccable and interestingly, the wait staff included a very bright Hainanese guy, a voluble Italian maitre d’ newly arrived from Brindisi, and a young Moscovite. It’s especially smart to have the Russian guy; every Caucasian on the island other than us seems to be Russian and there are a lot of them. All the signs are in Chinese, English and Russian.
It was a lovely way to cap off our stay. We’ll miss the beauty of the island, but we’re ready for our next adventure.