The weather was not that great for the last 3 days in Sanya. It was overcast and threatening to rain most of the time, but we still managed to get 2 full days on the beach (as well as a decent sun tan). Apparently a tropical storm hit the South coast of China earlier this week and is only moving Northwards by this weekend.

We discovered the best little dumpling restaurant (that’s if you can call a few plastic tables and chairs outside, a restaurant) just next to our hostel, so needless to say, we had loads of dumplings over the last 3 days - awesome! Yesterday we went to the beach for a few hours and the rest of day was spent relaxing, taking an afternoon nap and watching the Olympics opening ceremony in our room (yes, hostel rooms in China all have TV’s!).

Check-out was at noon today, so we left our bags at the hostel and headed straight for the beach. We found a very nice spot under some palm trees and parked off there for most of the day. Late afternoon we bought drinks at a supermarket and sat in a park watching some of the Olympic gymnastics on a big screen with lots of other locals.

Back at the hostel we managed to take a quick shower and we’re about to go to the train station to get the 23:55 train. This is the first of two 12-hour journeys ahead of us - both on hard sleepers - and we should arrive in Kunming on Monday morning.

If you can’t see the slideshow above click here.

‘Around the world in 80 days’ has proven to be a tough act to follow, it’s taken us 135 days!

Although we’re still about 360km short of the magical 40,075km mark - equivalent to the circumference of the earth - we thought it would be ok to post this early.

Stats update:

We’ve now traveled 39,717km and visited 25 countries in 135 days. Of that we’ve spent a total of 27 days and 15 hours on some form of transportation and have taken 23 overnight trips. We’ve taken 77 trains, 68 buses and 10 ferries, and have stayed in 31 youth hostels, 19 hotels, 5 guest houses and 4 different private accommodations.

We’ll be spending another 2-odd weeks in China before starting with South East Asia on about the 20th of August when we plan to enter Vietnam.

Luckily we didn’t have to spent too much time in the chaotic waiting hall before we boarded our overnight train at 21:25 in Guangzhou - not too optimistic about the journey ahead. We were pleasantly surprised with a very quiet coach and not even a single snorer. We actually managed to get a good few hours sleep and woke up as the entire train was being loaded onto a ferry for the crossing to Hainan island.

Hainan is a relatively large island in the south of China -roughly the same size as Taiwan. It is well known under rich Chinese travellers as a tropical island get-away. The train pulled into Sanya station at 12:40 on Tuesday afternoon and we decided to take a local bus to the main beach stretch where we wanted to stay. The 2-3 km ride ended up taking more than 35 minutes going all over town and it took us a while to find the hostel (again due to the Lonely Planet’s marvelous maps).

The Blue Sky Youth Hostel comes highly recommended by the Lonely Planet and we got a very nice sea view double room. It was around 15:00 that we went for a walk on the beach and Jan even took a quick dip! The beach was absolutely packed - we saw a few foreigners but the majority were Chinese holidaymakers.

To our surprise Sanya is a major beach holiday destination  for Russian tourists too. We were even more surprised to see around 80% of the shops, restaurants and hotels advertising, and some even writing their names, in Russian. Inspite of this we have still not managed to get rid of our left-over Russian currency - no bank in China will exchange Rubles.

We found a nice and relatively affordable cafe on the beachfront after spending some time looking around. Again we were very surprised to still see loads of people on the beach and in the water as this was already after 19:00 and starting to get dark. As we’ve experience before Chinese people have not inhibitions and seeing families walking around all dressed in matching two-piece Hawaiian safari suits is the norm here. As it is a Chinese culture-thing to have white skin (and the girls go to great lengths to accomplish that), it is very strange to see some of them actually sunbathing.

Today must have been the laziest day of the entire trip so far with us only getting out of our pajamas at 14:00 - and this was only because we had no food with us. The weather was dreadfull with non-stop rain, so we spent the day surfing the net in the comfort of our room on our new computer, after getting the necessary provisions for the rest of the day at the local supermarket.

We are currently contemplating changes to our current itinerary… more news to follow…

PS: Happy birthday Mom! We hope you had a great day on Tuesday!

If you can’t see the slideshow above click here.