Moving south

Train to Sanya

With an early afternoon train soon after check-out, I decided to skip breakfast and have some pastries instead. The idea was to have brunch around 1045 then checkout and get a taxi to the railway station.

Traffic jam during our brunch, in our Haikou alley due to one large car blocking the way.

All went according to plan and we got to Haikou East high-speed rail station around 1230. This is my first experience with rail travel since e-ticketing.

At the main entrance, we had to use a manual queue and show our passports to have ourselves verified against the ticket database. Once that was done, we would be able to board just by scanning our passport and also exit at the destination using the same.

Our 1352 train to Sanya departed about 10 mins late. It cclocked 247 km/h at its fastest point. With a journey time of about 90 mins, we got to Sanya before 1600.

Our train clocked 247 km/h en route.

The view en route was unspectacular with agriculture being the mainstay, eg. rice and fruit.

Arriving in Sanya

We hopped into a taxi to take us to the Care Coast Collection Hotel. Unfortunately, the driver wanted to rely on our navigation and Google Maps once again had the wrong location. Fortunately, the hotel was only a short walk away.

While the hotel was nice enough, they must have had awesome photographers. The imperfections in the wall paint and the stark fluorescent lighting wasn’t obvious from the photos, which truly looked quite luxurious and glamorous.

Most importantly though, the place was clean, functional and as a bonus, it was very spacious.

Sanya’s Waterfront

After about an hour resting in our rooms, we headed out around 1800 or a walk on the waterfront.

The beach had golden sand and the water was nice enough. I would say it was far nicer than Takapuna in Auckland, nicer than Singapore’s East Coast Beach or Patong in Phuket, but nowhere near Maldives.

However, I did find the fishing boats not too far away, off-putting, as with the ocean liners further away. There’s also an oil rig visible from certain angles.

The crowd was also made it not conducive for swimming. There was an area reserved for watersports but on either side of that, few people were in the water. Most were just standing around.

We moved away from the beach to the footpath and followed it south. Near the bridge to Phoenix Island, some police and ambulance officers were attending to someone who appeared to be unconscious or dead, possibly from drowning.

We grabbed a simple dinner nearby, avoiding the rip-off prices for seafood. We were glad that we ate eaten-up large back in Haikou.

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