Haikou – Day 5

It like going to sleep in one place and waking up somewhere entirely different.  Where yesterday it was like we were wandering around a ghost town, today there are people all over the place (relatively speaking of course as I’m sure the hotel is still nowhere near full).  People are at the pool, in the hallways and in the restaurants.  With today being the May Day holiday, I guess there is a pretty big flow of people from Guangzhou, Shenzen, and Hong Kong looking to get away for a few days.  In any case, with a whole lot more activity it seems a lot more like a resort hotel, although the solitude of having the place to ourselves is gone.

Speaking of big changes, we walked a few miles down the beach today towards Holiday Beach (where the locals go), and to our great surprise, between yesterday and today, the beach had been cleaned up. No garbage. No dead fish. No light bulbs.  It was like a team of a thousand people came through during the night and picked up what would have been at least a ton of trash.  And not only the bits of garbage, where there were chunks of rubble from old walls that had collapsed, there is now only sand.  It looks much, much better, but the degree to which it changed overnight only adds to the surreality of this place.

For the most part we have done all that we can here, so we are talking once again about cutting our stay here a bit short and moving on to Hong Kong early.  With the holiday traffic it turns out the tickets are really expensive (about $250 each) so who knows.  As strange as our stay here has been, the place grows on you and there is certainly a part of me that will find it hard to leave.