Hainan - Chinese South Sea

From October 1st to 8th, China celebrates its National Day and Autumn Festival. That meant it was time for us to travel again! Together with friends we met here in Suzhou, we spontaneously booked tickets to Haikou (Hainan) two days before departure. Hainan is located at the same latitude as Vietnam and is also known as the Chinese South Sea.

Thursday evening we finally arrived at the hotel in Haikou. Since we wanted to wait for our friends who arrived on a later flight, we took a look around the surroundings. By coincidence, we stumbled upon a celebration for the National Day in a park next to our hotel, featuring a very ecological fireworks display. Instead of rockets, drones were used here, which lit up in different colors and flew in various formations.

After our friends also arrived at the hotel, we started planning the next day.

The next morning, we rented bicycles and rode along the coast/beach of Haikou.

Then we had ourselves driven to a volcanic geopark. The volcano has been dormant for quite some time and is now overgrown by the jungle, but the contours can still be clearly seen. After a walk on the crater, we were also able to go inside the volcano.

We ended our first day of vacation with a pizza and planning for the next day.

Since Haikou itself is not that spectacular, we traveled to Wanning by train the next day. As we drove to the hotel by taxi, we slowly but surely got the impression that something was going on here 10 years ago, but now it's rather dead: everywhere half-ruined ghost hotels surrounded by forest. The perfect setting for the next horror film! However, we were lucky because our hotel was quite modern and even relatively new. Since, as I said, there were only ruined hotels around our hotel, we had a bit of a hard time finding food, but in the end we still managed to find something. Freshly strengthened, Simon and I then made our way to the botanical garden (another insider tip in Simon's travel guide). At first, the garden didn't really look special, but the longer we were there and the closer we looked, the more enthusiastic we became. For example, not only pepper, but also mango, bananas, passion fruit, durian, vanilla, and much more were grown here, and even experiments were conducted on how to combine coconut plantations (monocultures) with other crops to break up the monocultures.

And so we finally made it to where the pepper grows!

The next day, we exchanged our accommodation in the middle of nowhere for one near the beach and spent two days at the beach, including an e-bike tour:

After two days at the beach, Simon and I wanted to see something different. While our friends extended their beach vacation for a few more days, we said goodbye and headed towards the interior (Baoting).

On the same day, we were taken to the foot of Seven Fairy Mountain. The ascent was quite relaxing at the beginning, but after a few kilometers, the hard work began: at least 2 kilometers of hiking consisting of 80% stair climbing. After passing the sign "only 100m left", we were really looking forward to the view and successfully ignored the hint from the guidebook that "the last 100m are a bit adventurous". And then we stood there, in front of the last 100m:

In the end, we also survived the last meters unharmed, because we didn't want to miss the view after this stair march!

Back in Baoting, we ended our last evening with a delicious meal before setting off on our way home the next morning with severe muscle soreness.