Last month, having needed a long overdue break and further egged on by cheap airfare from Tiger Airways, I made an impromptu decision to visit Hainan - the Southern most territory of China and geographically next to Vietnam, as tropical as Southeast Asia.

We spent some 9 days covering Qionghai, beach destination Sanya and capital city Haikou. There isn’t exactly a lot to do in Hainan and 9 days indeed proved to be a tad too long, so by day 5 or so I was already getting bored. The itinerary could have been easily under 4 days, 3 days in Sanya and a day in Haikou, skipping Qionghai altogether.

Sanya is what I believed to be the main reason people visit this island. Although lined with seemingly endless stretches of beaches - some pristine, others not so - it is an atypical choice for a beach destination. Most people would be flocking towards Tioman, Pattaya and the likes, where the water is much clearer.

Sanya is potentially headed towards either a beach paradise or a kitschy tourist trap, and it hasn’t decided which. The southern coast is prime real estate, where endless private developments and hotels sprout sporadically fronting its own quiet stretch of beach, effectively rendering it almost private. The masses would be seen elsewhere at Dadonghai beach.

Haikou is only mention-worth of its vibrant shopping street that is Jiefangxilu, and more so nearby, some supposedly ‘century-old’ labyrinthine wet and filthy streets with hawkers selling all sorts of animals for food, from chickens to turtles, quails to even domestic cats - still alive in their cramped and unhygienic cages. An exhilarating living museum to just walk through, this is.

The air reeks of decadence, where its hedonistic youths - especially the sun-baked and weathered males - are often seen idling the streets without a shirt from dawn till past midnight.

See my Flickr photoset here.

Suggestive ad for Ivory Soap with gay connotations from the 1910’s / idgsn

“We all had a bath…about 25 being under the hose at one time…It certainly seemed like home to rub in the mild Ivory lather from head to foot and then feel the delightful exhilaration following a brisk rub down.”