Just got back from my wonderful spring break in South China! I was planning on going with just my friend Mal, but we ended up booking the same exact trip as 5 of our guy friends, so we more or less tagged along with them. Unfortunately we couldn't find a train that could take us from the Yellow Mountains to Guilin, so we skipped those and went directly to Guilin, which is this gorgeous city in the south of mainland China. While there we stayed in a nice hostel and did some touristy things each day, including a park that had a huge monkey population we got to get so close to! We also tried to take a boat trip down the Li River, but for some reason the boat never showed up? China...
We stayed in Guilin for 2 days then took a 10-hour overnight train to Zhenjiang train station, which ended up being the most rural part of China I've been to so far. It was really isolated and hot, but they of course still had Coke products and a flat-screen tv! Then we took a 9 hour train to Sanya that was pretty miserable during the 3 hour stretch it took them to ferry us from mainland China to Hainan Island, during which time the air conditioning was off!
Once in Sanya we were in paradise. Sanya's basically Russia's Mexico, so people kept thinking we were Russian and trying to speak with us (the one time I would've understood more if they spoke Chinese!) The beach is the best I've been on, with beach chairs and umbrellas for practically nothing, gorgeous sands, clear skies, and the warmest and gentlest ocean you could imagine. Women walked around selling coconuts, mangoes, sugarcane, and other fruit who's names I don't know but were delicious! The only downside was the wicked humidity, and that our hostel only had air conditioning from 10pm-10am to save costs. Basically every day went like this: wake up around 12 sweating since the air was off, get into our suits and eat either a BLT or a chicken sandwich at the hostel, go down to the beach, relax and do whatever we want for hours, go back to our hostel when the sun went down, shower and get dressed, then go to one of 2 American bars in down and have dinner and watch sports. Living the dream! I got ridiculously burned the first day, but it's not peeling very badly and should turn into a nice tan =)
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| Mountainside in Guilin |
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| View from the top of a Guilin Mountain |
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| Gorgeous park we found in Guilin |
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| MONKEY!!!! |
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| 5RMB for pictures with a peacock! |
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| River we were supposed to cruise down |
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| Female Buddha Statue |
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| I love the shapes of these mountains |
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| As always in China, safety first! |
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| Heaven on Earth: Sanya |
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| Miss it already |
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| Live music at our favorite bar, The Dolphin |
It's so weird to think I only have 18 days left here, I really want to be home but at the same time I really don't want to leave! :/
