Sanya Marriott Resort & Spa

This is one of the ports that we bypassed on the last cruise because of a typhoon. It was the very first time the Holland America cruise line had docked there. As a result, I don't think the town was ready for the 1600 people that hit shore. From the ship briefings, there wasn’t a lot there that interested us or that Cub was physically able to do. (I must add a note here: We received a comment on our blog from a reader we ...

... so we didn’t get the extraordinary service we received at lunch.

After about a ½ hr at the casino (it is not as much fun without my gambling partner) I headed back to the cabin with a couple of glasses of wine for us. Our cabin steward brought in our Vietnamese landing cards that we will need tomorrow. After a shower & the wine we set our clocks back 1 hour & headed to bed. Boy we are the last of the late night partiers.... after all it is 2100....

... your favorite tunes from the Vietnam War years) and once to explore Yalongwan Beach with Patrick and Amanda. Yalongwan Beach was supposedly even more beautiful than Dadonghai Beach, and also supposedly 40 minutes from our hostel by bus, except that it took us a lot longer because the bus got a flat tire and we had to stop while they fixed it. This ended up being a blessing in disguise, because as soon as the bus had stopped ...

... I passed the time with NPR podcasts while Gabe slept. We finally got into Sanya at around 4 pm, and headed right down the the beach after dropping our bags in our rooms at the Blue Sky International Hostel. (Sidenote: the beds had soft mattresses- weird for China!)

The beach in Dadonghai Bay (Big East Ocean Bay, the section of Sanya where our hostel was) is very funny, because it is a traditionally Russian vacation spot. Many signs are in Cyrillic and ...

Was not overly impressed with Sanya. Sanya is 100% tourist. Mostly Chinese with a lot of Russians. The town is very pretty and the beaches are great. I enjoyed talking with some of the Russians. I guess I did not like the fact that it was one huge tourist trap, not my cup of tea.

... past each other they would have water fights. It looked like fun. When he came back he guided us to the docks to catch a boat. But we had to wait for a small tourist group to come and then we would get on with them for free. It is the way the locals do it. Our boat was not one of the water fighting boat but at one point we did get close enough to get wet. Off we go to this strip of sandy beach off the coast. It must have some significance but ...

'I'm not sure if it's good to have freedom or not... I'm really confused now. If you're too free, you're like the way Hong Kong is now. It's very chaotic. Taiwan is also chaotic... I'm gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we're not being controlled, we'll just do what we want.' -- Jackie Chan to an audience of business leaders on Hainan island.

... got up and pointed down the stairs but was waved back to my seat. Next minute menus were placed before us and a huge pot of green tea. One menu was entirely in Russian, the other in Russian and English. I tried to indicate we couldn't understand the Russian one to no avail. So we ordered off the English one, beef and pork. Obviously we weren't capable of doing the seafood thing. Ah well. Next we tried to order beer. We were offered a sheet of pictures of vodka. Nyet ...

... followed by a meal (more of a banquet really) and then we young folk detatched ourselves from the olds and went out for the stag night. This got off to a slow start, with Dave getting angry at the guys on the door for not doing us a deal on beer prices. One place did do a deal, but once we got inside and sat down the waiter said it had just turned 10 so the deal was now invalid. We moved on. Eventually we settled in a chinese ...

... At times it was a bit like dining on a battlefield. The set dinner for two was basically the same as the one in Daidonghai - at the same price - Y68 for two. Once again it came with two different soups - borcht and cream of corn, but two different main courses - one combination pork and beefsteak (with rice), the other a rather fatty chicken steak with spaghetti. But this meal also included a salad and a dessert (shared), with the interesting name "Pork chop ice-cream." It ...