Back in October, after being in Shanghai for a mere 2 months and a rather turbulent transition into expat life and a new career, my friend Molly and I decided we needed to book a weekend away in the near future. There are so many interesting and beautiful places you can travel to relatively inexpensively in Southeast Asia but after doing some research and wanting to get the most bang for our buck with little travel time and requiring we be on the beach, we decided on Hainan, China.
Hainan is a lush tropical paradise off the southern coast of China (still part of China, however). We were able to find non-stop, round trip tickets, 3 weeks out from Shanghai (PVG), through Spring Airlines for $170USD, that sounded like a deal to us! We booked a room at the Huayu Resort & Spa Yalong Bay Sanya for around $115USD that included breakfast.
We arrived in Sanya (an area of Hainan) late Thursday night and got a cab to the resort, around 100RMB, or 16USD, then checked in easily and turned in for the night. The next morning we awoke and started exploring. Our resort had 3 pools, all somewhat limited on seating, but never too crowded, and after a short walk access to a beautiful beach.
A view of one of the pools, you can see there’s not much seating, but it wasn’t very crowded either.
The beach was beautiful, extremely clean, and surrounded by mountains and islands in the distance.
This was just as the sun was setting, Chinese vs. Russians volleyball, very interesting to say the least.
Overall the resort was nice, offered a few different restaurants on the property and was very close to Starbucks, Pizza Hut, many Chinese options, a large supermarket, pharmacy, and other places to accommodate tourists very easily. The breakfast buffet was expansive and we left very full each morning and usually didn’t eat lunch. The only problem we had was the air conditioner in the room was not cool at all and after many reports to the staff we were changed to a different, larger room, but sadly it wasn’t any better there either. We didn’t spend a lot of time in the room, but when you come in from being in the heat all day it would have been nice to come in to a cool room and especially at night. However the property and room itself was nice and comfortable aside from that. For a weekend getaway it was exactly what we needed and wanted.
life without a cape 