Fun (and Burning) in the Sun: My Vacation in Sanya

Beautiful Sanya beach!

Hey everyone! So we just got back from our last vacation, which was in Sanya. It's crazy to think that in a few weeks, I'll be back home. This whole experience has been incredible, but I'll talk more about that in a later post. For now, this post is all about Sanya, or otherwise known as the Hawaii of the East.

Sanya itself is rather interesting. You have to take a ferry to get there, and it's even more hot and muggy than it is in Zhongshan (which I didn't think was possible). Sanya is also home to a lot of Russians. Why? Well, apparently Scandinavia and Russia get really good deals to come to Sanya and people from there can go to Sanya for up to six months without a visa. As a result, there are a lot of Russian tourists and visitors. In fact, the locals in Sanya are more likely to know Russian than English. It was here that we got mistaken for Russians all the time. It makes sense, since we're white and they get a lot of Russian tourists.

Anyway, the first day of our vacation was spent sunbathing on the beach. The beaches are quite
beautiful and the ocean is a gorgeous blue. On the downside, there was some garbage in the ocean and on the beach. In general, though, the beach was quite nice. Unfortunately I underestimated the sun's strength and I got sunburned. Again. Despite the fact that I put a lot of sunscreen on and reapplied. I guess I was just out there too long. This time it wasn't so bad, I just got burned a little on my back and legs. I've only peeled a little (yay!), which hopefully means I'll have a nice tan.

Awesome beach pose! 

As a result of getting burned, we spent most of Sunday avoiding the sun. It worked since Sunday was ridiculously hot. We mainly spent time in a local mall and walked around various little stores and boutiques. We went to the beach once the sun went down and things cooled off. The beach was pretty crowded and it was fun to see all the people.

I also found out another fun fact about China. In China, the people wait until the sun goes down before they go swimming at the beach. I think they feel the opposite that we do. We want to be more tan so we sunbathe, Chinese people want to be more white, so they avoid the sun. It's kind of sad, actually. I guess we can't be happy the way we are. Ha, I'm no exception since I'm happy I got a nice tan. Oh, well.

Monday was also spent on the beach, but we did a bit of surfing. Marlo, one of the girls in my group, knew how to surf so we decided to rent a surfboard and have her teach us the basics. I'll tell you right now, it isn't easy. You have to not only focus on steering the surfboard, but also balancing yourself completely. You lean a little too much to the left or right and down you go! All the same, it was pretty fun. I actually got to the point where I could crouch, though standing up all the way proved to be difficult.

Tuesday was (surprise!) another day at the beach. We mainly just chilled and walked along the waves, finding cool shells and rocks. I did see a moon jellyfish, which was pretty cool. They basically look like giant blobs of clear jelly. We basically relaxed this whole vacation, which honestly was pretty nice. It's fun to have crazy vacations where you do a lot of stuff, but it's also fun to have ones where you don't do much. So we just bummed on the beach a lot.

Just me enjoying some ice cream on the beach

We left Tuesday, but let me tell you about our little fiasco. We booked train tickets to leave from Sanya to Guanzhou. We had to take a bus to the train station. We knew that the bus ride would take about 20 minutes, so we left for the train station with plenty of time, or so we thought. What happened was that the bus got stuck in traffic, and it took over an hour to get to the station. By the time we got there, we had probably two minutes before the our train left. Unfortunately, the platform had closed. So we missed our train. One of the guards led us over to another train and we ended up having to call our coordinator, who spoke Chinese, to talk with them. We then arranged to take the speed train to catch up with our train at one of the stops. So we rode a speed train to Haikou and then got on our train and rode to Guangzhou. It was crazy and pretty stressful, but we eventually made it back to Zhongshan. Anyway, the moral of the story is don't forget to take traffic into account when you figure out travel time.

Well, that's my Sanya vacation. Besides the train adventure, it was pretty relaxing and I'm glad we went. It was a great last vacation! Anyway I'll be posting a few more times before I head back to the States. They'll probably be about China in general and random things I've learned. Oh, here are some more pictures in Sanya. Until later, folks!

I just can't get over the blue sky and ocean! 

Me and the girls doing a yoga pose. I love those girls!

Beautiful sunset