Tropical Hainan – China’s Hawaii
China Today by Bill Brown, October 14, 2016 Adjust font size:
Before moving to China, my favorite hideaway was Hawaii, so I was delighted to learn China has its own Hawaii – southernmost Hainan Province.
A Han Dynasty (206 BC - AD 220) emperor established a military garrison on Hainan Island, the largest island of Hainan Province, in 110 BC. Sun Yat-sen recommended the establishment of a province in the region in 1906, but this did not happen until 1988, the year we moved to China.
Over three times the size of Hawaii’s largest island, Hainan Island’s natural and cultural diversity is breathtaking – white coral sand beaches, coconut plantations, hot springs, rare birds, and wildlife such as the clouded leopard.
Our first trip to Hainan was in January 1994, when we drove 6,000 km around South China to gear up for our 40,000 km drive to Tibet five months later. We packed our van with food, clothes, bedding and the boys’ schoolbooks and headed south. We soon realized why officials had discouraged us from making the trip.
China has excellent highways today, but in 1994 it was like driving on the moon. I averaged only 20 to 25 mph even on highways. In one village, I crawled so slowly over the potholes and ruts that a senior villager grinned as she passed me on her rusty bicycle.
We learned that privacy is elusive in a nation of 1.3 billion people. Even in the remotest woods, every time we set up camp, locals appeared seemingly from thin air and squatted in a circle around us – though at a polite distance – to watch us cook, eat and prepare for bed. When some obviously poor farmers shyly handed us fruit and vegetables I thought they were selling them, but not so. They were giving us the food because they thought our meal too austere. Although the driving was exhausting, I was re-energized daily by the hospitality and openness of the people we encountered.
Bill Brown and his two kids on the beach at Hainan’s beautiful coastal city of Sanya.
At 1 am on the third day, we rode the car ferry to Hainan Island and checked into Haikou’s Overseas Chinese Hotel. We looked forward to the first sleep in days in a warm bed – but it wasn’t warm. A cold front had hit Haikou (about 10 degrees centigrade), and the hotel had no heating because, as the shivering maid explained, “It’s never cold in Haikou.” So we warmed the room with Sue’s hair dryer.
The following day we spent 12 hours driving 170 km to Hainan’s first tourist resort, Dongjiao Coconut Plantation, where we stayed in a quaint Polynesian hut nestled midst coconut trees. Energetic grannies hawked fresh coconut juice, tousled our towheaded sons’ hair, and debated what province these strange Chinese were from. I was delighted to learn that many spoke the Minnan dialect common in Xiamen and Taiwan. When I spoke a few phrases in Minnan they acted like I was a long lost relative – albeit a strange one.