Summertime in Sanya 2: Return Visit

Hello again! It has been… a while. Unsurprisingly, I have once again fallen rather behind in keeping this blog updated with my travels and adventures while living abroad. (Turns out having a time-consuming job and chaotic brain chemicals will do that to you.) I’ve not posted in over a year, and am two years behind in trips. And I know that I could just jump forward in time and skip over a few trips, but A) my brain doesn’t work like that, and B) the whole point of my writing these was to share the cool things I’m learning, especially about the places that people might not have heard much about before. So… bear with me, and thank you for reading, and hopefully I will get back to these at a somewhat regular schedule. Maybe. Hopefully.

We last left off in July of 2022. After the nightmare that was the Shanghai lockdown during the pandemic, Michael and I were free(ish) for the summer and set out to travel to the few provinces who would actually let in people coming from Shanghai. After having toured around Guilin and Yangshuo (my last few posts), we headed down to somewhere warm and tropical where I had been the summer before: 三亚 Sanya! (As I’ve already written a few posts with a bit more context for Sanya, please feel free to go back and read Part 1 and Part 2 from my previous trip there for a more detailed background on most of the places I’ll mention in this blog! Saving time, catching up on blog posts, go go go! I can do this.)

For our first 5 days, we stayed in the area I had visited the summer before: 大东海 Dadonghai, one of the more popular tourist areas. When booking our hotel for Dadonghai, we were amazed to find an incredible deal: a room for $45 a night, with a view of the ocean?! What was the catch??! (After our first night there, the catch became ever so apparent: paper thin walls, and clientele who take advantage of the many nearby bars and clubs. The drunk people finally started going to bed around 4:00 am, only for the babies to wake up around 5:00. It was not our best week of sleep…) Even so, we had a rooftop pool, an under-5-minute walk to the beach, and were staying in a giant mall shaped like a pineapple – life was good.

In addition to wandering the boardwalk, sipping fun tropical cocktails (if it wasn’t a Blue Hawaiian or served out of a coconut, I was not interested), and desperately trying to slather on enough sunscreen to make it through the next week and a half, I wanted to make sure to bring Michael to one of the spots I’d enjoyed the year before: 鹿回头公园 Luhuitou Park. (See my previous Sanya post for more background info!) Though I’m still not convinced that the love story of the hunter and the deer-fairy is a romance we should aspire to – generally, I find fleeing in terror to not be a great start to a relationship – I always appreciate a local myth.

We hiked our way up and around the mountain park, enjoying the views from the top and the many nods to the origin story including the live deers you can feed and the big statue at the top of the park. After having been out in the sun for a few hours, we decided it was time for a little treat and bought ourselves some ice cream cones. Now, at just about any other park on a summer day, ice cream seems like an obvious good choice; in a tropical island in China, however, we had forgotten to take into account one very important aspect into consideration: the monkeys.

You see, Sanya is an area of China where macaques make their home and, having been exposed to tourism quite frequently, these monkeys do not fear humans. (I don’t think they fear much, to be honest. They are little terrors. Cute little terrors, but terrors nonetheless.) And so on said hot summer day, the macaques ALSO thought that ice cream sounded like a nice treat and would stop at nothing to get it. As soon as we started the hike back down the mountain road with our ice cream cones, the monkey gangs surrounded us. And not like the “oh cute, look at all of the monkeys” type of surrounded us, the “there are 5 large, aggressive monkeys swiping at my legs” type of surrounded us. I had what can only be described as the Macaque Mob Boss come right up to me and make like he was going to lunge at me, the monkey equivalent of “You want to take this outside, bro?” as he kept lurching towards me and getting closer each time. But hey, his scare tactics worked; rather than wait to see if he would follow through with his threats, I decided I valued my fingers more than my ice cream and chucked the cone as far away from me as I could. My monkey gang took off after the cone, no longer interested in me. Michael held on longer, however – he was really excited about the ice cream cone and didn’t want to trash it. It did lead to this delightful video, though – it’s like Chris Pratt and the velociraptors, only it’s Michael and the macaques instead. (Shortly after I stopped recording, he too threw his ice cream cone away from him. It just was not meant to be…)

After our first few days in Dadonghai, we took a taxi up to a different beach for a night. We wanted to be able to see a few different parts of the island rather than spend all of our time in in the busiest part, and so we decided on a night in 亚龙湾 Yalong Bay. Yalong Bay sits on a crescent-shaped sandy beach about 7,000 meters long, and is known as being one of the most beautiful beaches in Sanya with its clear water, blue skies, and surrounding green hills. We were excited to explore these new (slightly less crowded) beaches, but before we could do that: food adventure.

A brief note about division of labor: as Michael and I travel together fairly frequently, we’ve worked to figure out how to split up who is responsible for what on each trip. Being the obsessive control freak that I am, I tend to take on much of the activity planning because I enjoy deep diving into itineraries and looking for fun things to do and destinations within a place. (I also regularly have at least 8 tabs open on my laptop at a time. This may or may not be related.) But something in Michael’s domain is deciding on restaurants. When we know where we’re going, Michael will go in and do the reading on any good restaurants in the area that we should visit, and figure out a plan. For our first night in Yalong Bay, Michael had done just that: found a restaurant, made a reservation, and kept any more information than that a surprise. Even as we were on our way to dinner, all he told me was that “it’s like a treehouse… I think.”

After a drive that took us away from the beach and up into the tropical forest surrounding Yalong Bay, our taxi dropped us off at a resort named Yalong Bay Earthly Paradise Bird’s Nest Resort. After waiting in the lobby for a bit, a golf cart arrived to bring us even further up, up, up into the rainforest until we reached the very top of the mountain.

Finally, we arrived at 海阔天空泰餐厅 Haikuotiankong Thai Restaurant, and were led out to our open-air table overlooking the tropical rainforest and the views of Yalong Bay below. With panoramic views of the surrounding area, it really did feel like the restaurant was in its own little treehouse or bird’s best at the very top of the forest. Not only were we able to enjoy the beautiful scenery while we watched the sun set, but the Thai food was absolutely fantastic. We ordered Tom Kha Gai, spring rolls, and noodles, but the real treat was the crab and yellow curry. It was mouthwateringly good. A+ on the restaurant find, Michael. If we ever go back to Sanya again, I would absolutely return here.

The next morning, though we only had a few hours before checking out and heading off to our final Sanya destination, we wanted to go out and see the beach that Yalong Bay is famous for. While we were met with a lot of construction – not quite the beautiful, peaceful views we were anticipating – we still found a little patch of sand we could lounge in for a while. (To be clear – I lounged in the sand. Michael tucked himself up under a beach umbrella to read his book. Our bodies can handle sun differently in that I can be out in the sun for more than 5 minutes without burning and Michael instantly turns into a lobster. Hence, we religiously carry sunscreen around with us.)

Next, we headed off to our final destination: 海棠湾 Haitang Bay. Being a bit further out from the central hub of Sanya, the beaches in Haitang Bay are typically quieter and cleaner than the others, and home to multiple resorts with various activities and attractions. As we were very much still in the throws of “we survived an awful and traumatic pandemic lockdown, we deserve a break,” we booked a few nights at the InterContinental for some adventuring and some relaxing. As someone who specifically books hotel rooms based on their bathtubs (I am what I am, and I am not ashamed) I was thrilled that our delightfully large bathtub was located on a covered outdoor balcony with a clear view of the ocean just beyond. One of the very best hotel bathtubs – good job, InterContinental.

Our second day, I wanted to bring Michael to another park I’d been to the summer before, so we hopped in a taxi and headed out to spend a few hours at the 呀诺达 Yanoda Rainforest Park. In addition to all of the usual Chinese tourist gimmicks like glass bridges, big swings, zip lines, and cute selfie spots, here there are all kinds of hiking paths through the rainforest where you can just breathe the fresh air and enjoy being lost in these giant trees and draping vines. A special highlight that we especially enjoyed was the aviary; after paying to bring in some food for the birds, we soon had all sorts of little friends climbing all over us. It was maybe the greatest thing I’ve ever done.

The next day, we pretended to be fancy and hopped over to the Atlantis resort. (Our “being fancy” actually just looked like us buying tickets for the waterpark and the aquarium, but still.) As we were in the aquarium, we were notified by the travel organization we were in touch with for the trip we were supposed to be going on next that the trip had to be cancelled due to Covid outbreaks in the destination. We sat staring at the beluga whales trying to find a way that we could justify still heading down to the next province, but given what we had just gone through with the lockdown, did not want to risk getting infected and being put into a quarantine camp. (Things were scary here in China, y’all. I know we’re a few years out and it all feels like a bad dream, but it was really bad here for a while.) We cancelled our next flight to Guangxi, and booked a return trip to Shanghai instead.

To console ourselves on having to cancel our we are finally free of Covid lockdowns trip early due to more Covid lockdowns, we went in to grab drinks at the Atlantis hotel bar before our dinner reservation. Now here we are, thinking this is a pretty fancy hotel with a pretty fancy bar menu, right? Michael orders a Manhattan, and I ordered a yummy mocktail with some kind of soda water/mint/fruit/simple syrup concoction – nothing too crazy. What arrives, very proudly, is a small bit of whiskey doused in soda water (Michael’s Manhattan) and some kind of iced coffee/strawberry ice cream assortment (my… mocktail). I pulled the menu back out to confirm with our bartender whether I had received the drink I ordered, pointing to it and going over some of the ingredients, to which the bartender replied “Yep, this is it! I made it myself, and it’s my own recipe!” She was so sweet and proud of it, who was I to tell her it was wrong? Michael very kindly switched drinks with me (as I don’t drink coffee) and we carried on with our happy hour. If I have learned anything from traveling, sometimes it’s just best to go with the flow and be ready to bounce.

For dinner that night, Michael had also made a reservation ahead of time for Bread Street Kitchen and Bar, Gordon Ramsay’s only restaurant in China at the time! (There is now also one here in Shanghai.) Though I’ve never seen his show, Michael was very excited to eat here and insisted we absolutely had to order the Beef Wellington. (This is a thing? Gordon Ramsay’s Beef Wellington? I do not entirely know, but if someone tells me this is the thing we are supposed to order, who am I to argue?) Michael’s reaction upon taking his first bite: “Pure bliss.” I have to agree – it was incredible.

After our meal, I was surprised when the servers brought out a small birthday dessert to our table. As my birthday is in April, and Michael’s in October, we were not technically celebrating either of our birthdays here in July; but since I had spent my 30th birthday alone locked down in my apartment, Michael wanted to make sure we were still able to go out for a fancy meal to celebrate. And I will always accept a belated birthday dessert!

As we packed everything up to prepare to head back to Shanghai, we looked back on the wonderful week and a half we’d been able to spend down in Sanya. Between beautiful sandy beaches and awesome rainforest adventures, Hainan really has a lot to offer. And while I know that for most people reading this blog, there are probably tropical islands much closer and more accessible for you to reach, if you ever find yourself in China and wanting beach vacation vibes: Sanya really has a lot to offer, and so many things to do. We are, as always, thankful for this incredible, incredible life we lead.

Thanks again for jumping back in after my yearlong absence, and stick with me – more coming soon!