The Russian Hainan

After our stint in Hongkong where English is the standard, we had to return back to the mainland, however, not for long as our destination happened to be city Sanya in Hainan, the most southern island in China. After 14 hour ride in a train (from a couple of hours is spent on a ferry locked in the train) we arrived to the sunny Sanya full of beaches and of course stalking taxi drivers who want you to catch a ride with them no matter what :).

To our surprise, it is tough to imagine that Sanya is part of China as all the shops and restaurants have signs in Russian. After a bit of investigation we found out that there is a direct flight from Moscow to Sanya and one major Russian travel agency has their office in Sanya. If you ask me, this is a hell of a marketing campaign to turn a Chinese city into Russian holiday destination. In any way, it was advantageous to us as Libor can read some Russian, so we knew what was around us. However, as it turned out, perhaps it is good there are majority of Russian tourists there as the English is not up to par yet :).

The idea here was to take it easy and rest up on the beach before we head to Vietnam. We did just that, so nothing much exciting going on. Just the usual skinny Russian wives and their chubby husbands :).

The trip to Vietnam had turned out to be a bit more hassle than we have bargained for, but on the other hand it went quite smoothly.

First, bus to Haikou (4 hrs), then overnight ferry to Beihai (12 hrs), after that bus to Nanning (4 hrs), after a night in a hotel, bus to Hanoi, Vietnam (10 hrs) with about 1.5 hrs at the border. Overall, it took us about 48 hrs to make it to Hanoi from Sanya, so if you are ever there and don't have this time, you should fly :). However, if you have time, the journey was not bad as far as the connections, so it is doable without major hassles.