Sanya

Hello Everyone. I know I haven't written in a while, but well I'm not much of a writer. Anyways, last month Andrea and I took a trip to Hainan Island to a city called Sanya. The island is known as a tropical resort place for Chinese and Russian tourist. It is located on about the same longitude as north Vietnam and has over 100 different variaties of mangos. Andrea and I went with 2 of our American friends for a long weekend trip. We stayed at a hotel called the Aegean Conifer Suites Resort Sanya.
First of all after the long flight down there and about 45 minute taxi ride we finally managed to get to the hotel. Chris had picked it out and decided that we should share a top floor suite. Good Decision! The hotel was very nice with something like 5 different pools, one of Andrea's favorite pool had a swim up bar too! She can mark that off her bucket list now. We got in on Wednesday and we were all very hungry, unfortunately with the perks of being away from any city came the "there are no restaruants" and we had to eat at the hotel. They were having a special all you can eat noodle bar. Now, I don't know how many nooodles you can eat, but I can't eat a lot so I felt a little cheated, oh well. The rest of the day was just lounging around the pool and getting unpacked. We did venture into town to eat at a famous western restaruant called Fat Daddy's.
The restaruants in Hainan are pretty cool, lots of out door seating and several places have outdoor grills where they make your food for you. This place did have delicious grilled food, I particulary like the grilled fish tacos, though Andrea said the hamburgers were good too.
Thursday we ate at the hotel again and stayed away from too much sun, the suntan lotion we all generously applied had expired about 5 years before, and yes suntan lotion does expire, and yes, it doesn't work anymore as our blotchy sunburns reminded us for the rest of the trip. Anyways, so thursday was spent swimming in the ocean or buying coconuts at the pool bar and filling them with rum! (Which started our theme song for the trip, put the rum in the coconut... Andrea changed "lime" to "rum" deaming it to be more appropriate). Also, at the beach we noticed that China has one of their "secret" submarine bases right next to us, so yippy for any sort of experiments they may have done to the water.
Friday- Yay! Chris and I decided we were going to pony up and pay for the scuba diving they offered. Being our first time we opted to do the 15 minute introduction course only available in Chinese.... yeah... well at least afterwards I felt less nervous about the diving, though I'm not sure exactly why. We then put on our wetsuits and waited for the boat to come pick us up at the dock. After a 10 minute boat ride they dropped us off at probably the only coral reef for miles, then 50 tourists wearing the divign suits and masks all jumped in to look at the 20'x20' reef. It was pretty cool actually! So at first my guide just pushed me underwater and told me to go. I didn't realize he was a guide so I took off away from all the crowds. As I was just minding my own business, I felt a hand and he motioned for me to rise to the top. I realized that he was suppose to show me around and I wasn't suppose to just take off. So after about 20 minutes in the water my guide gave me some fish food to attrack the colorful fish and I notice a different guy being pulled along by his guide. "Poor guy can't swim" I thought, and seeing that he was just being pulled around I figured it would be pretty boring. AFter we got back onto the boat I looked to Chris and said"did you see that poor sucker who was being pulled around?" He responded" That poor sucker was me" Oh... heh he said that his guide wouldn't let him swim on his own for some reason. We both kinda laughed and I think Chris still had a pretty good time.
Sat. WE spent more time on the beach and even had a chance to build a couple of sand castles! We had a few Chinese people take pictures but none of them tried to build any. As soon as we left I was taking bets on how long the castles would last and within a minute a chinese boy ran over and stomped our castles into serfdom. That night we headed over to a different hotel to eat their all you can eat meat and seafood buffet. It was great, they had live shrimps, a bunch of fish, oysters, chicken, ect. The food was cooked on this massive grill right in front of us. It was really good, towards the end of dinner and as it was getting late we noticed the bushes next to us were swarming in cockroaches. Chris got attacked two or three times before we could make our escape.
The pools at the hotel were pretty sweet too, on of the pools without the swim up bar had individual seats in the pool with jets shooting water out. The seats were like massage chairs or a personal whirl pool.It never seemed over crowded as we had several pools to choose from, or we could go to the private beach the hotel owned. AT night we even had our own personal hot tub we could lounge in if we didn't want to go to the pool downstairs....yes that's right our suite had it's own hot tub out on the deck. I'll try to put up a few pictures later to make you jealous, or to show you how bad our sunburns were so maybe you'll remember to always check the expiration date!