That feast I gorged on in the lounge? That was a mistake. After finishing up yesterday’s blog, I sauntered out of the lounge and over to the airport gate just in time for boarding, and got onto the plane with my load of gear just fine. I knew I was fine when I saw a couple not far in front of me lugging a medium sized suitcase and a sling bag AND a paper bag — each. If they could get on without a word, then I was completely fine too.

The plane ride itself was fine. The seats of the plane were all red in a festive sort of way, which made it easier to hide all the blood. I had my usual aisle seat, and the person in the middle was a child who promptly fell asleep and splayed out all over her seat and part of mine too, but the middle seats are always terrible so I didn’t mind her doing that. The safety instructional video at the start of the flight was played on overhead screens that came down from the ceiling, which was cute and a little unexpected. The planes also had personal air conditioner jets on the ceiling for every seat, like one might find on a long distance bus but that for some reason not many western aeroplanes have. That was nice too.

The schedule of the plane I took was officially:

Hainan Airlines HU7910
Singapore (Changi / T4) Feb 24 4:40 am -> Haikou (Meilan / T2) 8:15 am

Same time zone. We boarded on time from gate G10 in Changi, with wheels up coming at 4:39 am and wheels down at 7:39 am. Why I said the meal was a mistake though, was because even on such a short flight, they plied us with a pretty filling breakfast box. Like look at all this food for a 3 hour ride!

Dinner? Who needs dinner tonight? I was stuffed. My seatmates were asleep, and the attendant left a sticker on the back of the seats in front of them to let them know to call the attendants if they woke up and wanted food. They only woke up at the very end of the flight, and ended up taking their boxes off the plane, I think. I might have dozed off slightly but not for very long at all, though I nodded off on buses, trains, and taxis through the day and just took a normal night’s sleep at the end to catch up.

Anyway, the plane landed at Haikou without incident and I walked through immigration after filling in an online form while on my way from the gate to the immigration desk. The form did ask me for my date and method of departure, but it seemed to actually be an optional question and not actually required. The immigration officer also asked me how many days I’d be in the country, and I told her about 25 days and that seemed fine. I had lots of trouble with the fingerprint scanner and they had to help me out with it, this isn’t the first time and likely won’t be the last.

Soon, I was outside. Google Maps doesn’t exactly work in China — it’s not even about the network block/bypass, but rather that it does not have accurate data or route info at all. The best Englishy alternative to this that I know of and use is called Amap, and despite Gemini‘s suggestion not to take city transit with three bags and to take a Didi to my hotel instead, I actually found that one of the airport buses would drop me about five minutes from the hotel, so I went to try to navigate that instead.

I thought this screen in the airport was useful too. Knowing what I know now, The Meilan Railway Station option, the station attached to the Haikou Meilan International Airport that I landed at, would have also worked just fine and taken me even closer, but at that point I didn’t know for sure because it’s so hard to find out information about Haikou’s train system online. It didn’t functionally make a difference in the end whether I took the bus or the train though, since the hotel spot, for all its other quirks, turned out to be really convenient.

The info desk directed me to the airport bus stop where the ticket machine was located:

However, it seemed like the machines did not accept foreign passports as an identity document to buy a ticket from. At least not that that friendly attendant lady in the picture could figure out. In the end, she told me to Weixin (i.e. use WeChat Pay, they also call it Weixin and commonly use it as a verb too) her 20 yuan and she would buy a ticket for me. I had already set up WeChat Pay and connected it to my credit card while in Singapore, so she helped me figure out the process to transfer her the money and we did so.

The airport bus ran every 90 minutes, and the earliest bus ticket was for the one in 88 minutes time, but she said that the previous bus was late and not to worry about it, so she bought me a ticket for the next bus, then told the bus driver with authority when it arrived that she had bought the ticket for me, where I was going, and basically that it was all approved. And with that, I loaded my big bag into the luggage cabin under the bus, and then hopped onto the bus itself.

We passed some things that I remember as distinctly Chinese but that I had forgotten from my last trip here. Lots and lots of motorcycles and scooters, for one. And trees with the bottoms painted white.

Lots of solicitors was another one, either trying to sell me some sort of food, or trying to sell me a ride somewhere, I think. I think there were one or two waiting when I disembarked the bus, but there were many, many more waiting through the day, especially at major transit or tourist points. I refused them all though.

After disembarking at my bus stop, the Original Bus South Station one, I crossed a weird little purple motorcyclist lane and then eyed the shopping mall behind it:

This was the Longfor Hainan Haikou Paradise Walk, a multi-block REIT mall in the style of that Wing Bay Otaru one from Day 1, but much more glittery and upscale. And larger, I believe. And my hotel, the Xizhi Audio and Video Hotel, was located on the upper levels on the other end of the mall. I only knew this because Amap was able to pinpoint this location. The specific building (the tall one below) soon came into view on the right and that’s when I learnt that it was also basically right in front of a train station, Chengxi Railway Station.

And the station had a police box attached too.

Neat. I went up to the 17th floor where the “check-in desk” was located, and it turned out to be just a random housekeeping room with towels everywhere.

The person was as confused as me and said that the staff should have contacted me via WeChat. I showed them my booking on trip.com and she confirmed that it was legit, and asked me to contact a number with a picture of the booking, and after some more friction that someone eventually added me to a group chat with 8 other staff members and had me fill out a form and pay a damage deposit. They then told me the room was not ready yet anyway, since check-in was at 3 pm and it was only 9:30 am or so at the time. I had asked them about this on the trip.com site when I first booked it but I didn’t get the impression that they monitored chat on there at all. Anyway, WeChat comes with an automated chat translation thing so it was all good, and they said I could store my luggage at that room until my own room was ready, so I did so.

I went through the mall briefly, taking a couple of grand pictures:

But I wasn’t actually here for the mall yet. My utmost priority for the day was to figure out how to get from here to the mainland, specifically Zhanjiang, on Friday. To start, I went to the train station to check it out, going through a bag and body scanner, just like in other Chinese cities too. I then stared at the ticket machine for a while, trying to figure it out, and an officer came over to inquire.

We chatted for a bit, me in my broken Chinese and him using a translator app now and then when he used a term I didn’t understand, but I basically told him that I was going to Haikou Station to look at buses and the port not far from there. He said Haikou Station wasn’t quite at the port, and that’d I’d want to take a Didi (the equivalent of Uber in China) over to Nangang Station to buy tickets there, or go to Haikou West to buy a bus ticket or do it online. Something like that. He was very friendly and helpful, and also pointed out that I also couldn’t use that machine anyway since I had an overseas passport and it only worked for Chinese passports and passports from nearby territories and special regions (HK, Macau, etc). He instead took me to a desk where a woman scanned my passport and issued me a ticket instead. That desk is on the left here, with the ticket machine on the middle right and the security scanner on the near right.

I then sat down to wait for the train, and then took a picture of the train arrival board:

As well as the actual route map a bit later on:

It looks like they have trains that run the full line, from Meilan (the airport station) to Laochengzhen, and then trains that run a shorter line from Haikou to Haikoudong (Haikou East). But the city train was only 7 stops long within Haikou itself — from east to west, Meilan (for the airport connection and a high speed rail connection), Haikoudong (high speed rail connection), Chengxi (for this large mall where I was), Xiuying, Changliu, Haikou (high speed rail connection), and then Laochengzen, which itself is probably near a high speed rail connection too since there’s a stop named Laocheng, but I don’t know for sure and it doesn’t have the vertical line on it that the other named stations have on that picture above.

The trains were very bullet style-like:

There was an officer on the platform who had obviously been informed of my pending arrival by the officers below, and she chatted me up in a friendly manner as well and asked me what the word for “translate” was in English, and also “travel”. I had good experiences all around with the local officers. The train then arrived and she hurried off to the front of the train to help with signalling and coordination, and I boarded the train where we were chatting. There was another officer inside the train itself too, but that one hadn’t been informed and didn’t inquire about anything, I think she was just there to take care of the doors, so I just sat down to nap for a few minutes. And snap more pictures along the way. Is that a giant ship in the distance?

Haikou Station looked like this on the platforms:

It had a connecting underground area with transfer escalators to various platforms, in a very Shinjuku Station sort of way, except without nearly as many people. I was accosted by half a dozen or so solicitors when I stepped out of the station, all trying to give me a shady ride somewhere, and there an entire bus station there too.

This was a local bus station though, not one that would take me to another city. There was also a cute row of shops nearby:

I was not hungry but I bought a drink from one of the random shops.

Food, drinks, and a few other things are ridiculously cheap here and it can get really addictive to just spend and buy things somewhat frivolously. I must watch this. Or maybe it doesn’t really matter within reason, since it helps the local economy out a little. Especially small shops that might not make a lot of money. Hm.

I then decided to walk over to Nangang Port. Could have taken a taxi, but I wanted to get some exercise in and this turned out to be a very weird walk that had me walking along a footpath, then alongside a highway offramp for part of it before reconnecting to a footpath that had abruptly ended at that offramp from the other direction. I also passed many more trees painted white like this:

There were also plenty of palm trees in the city that can be seen in some of the earlier photos. I walked by a couple of vehicle checkpoints as well as I approached the port area, and eventually ended up here in a small waiting area full of weary people resting on seats under tents, and locals trying desperately to sel someone, anyone, some fruits, pre-packaged lunches, and rides to wherever they wanted.

I would eventually understand that this was the pick up/drop off point for people coming to/from the port without a connecting ride that had also come through or was going to go onto the ferry.

It was *also* the disembarkation point for people that had come on a bus or car that was going to go onto the ferry — the driver would take the vehicle (and heavy luggage) on through, but the passengers had to disembark here, walk up and across to more security screening at the port, and then actually board the ferry itself as passengers, joining the people who had come here “on foot” to be walk-on passengers. They went basically along this path:

Up an escalator then along long corridors:

Watch your head! … against a jutting out side wall?

Out onto a windy open area before the port building:

And then inside the building was a queue to get in past security and a ticket check.

Cool. I had seen a small building to buy a pass for your vehicle before the “Large buses” sign and the escalators much early on, and there were signs everywhere saying that you could use some WeChat mini application to buy a walk-on ticket (though the pictures did not match the actual app screen for me and everything was in Chinese — WeChat has a translation feature for chat and sometimes has one to translate what you see on screen too but that’s sometimes not available for the internal mini-apps. My Samsung Galaxy has a screen translation feature that works fairly well too but requires Google access. The latter mostly worked well in cases like this.) I think I could have figured it out and bought a walk-on ticket to the ferry if I wanted to, but that wasn’t my aim here.

No bus tickets here either though, nor was the Nangang Train Station actually a platform that one could board at. It’s just a transitional “trains get unhitched here, loaded onto a ferry, and get rehitched at the port across the strait” place. Cool. So I walked all the way back to the start of the escalator, and hailed a Didi car with the app to get me back to the heart of the city. This was my first actual, non-Kel-sponsored Didi ride I think, and is what really made me understand how cheap it was. I’ll post a price list of things I spent on today near the end of this post, but this 15-20 minute ride cost me 24.2 Chinese yuan, or just $4.80 CAD. Hm.

The ride I took was from Nangang port to “Haikou West Station (Inter-provincial bus station)” 海口汽车西站 (省际总站) in Chinese. Amap calls it “Haikou West Station Shengji Terminal”. Why this station doesn’t also have a RAILWAY station attached is beyond me, but it doesn’t. There were also a whole bunch of people offering rides here.  I believe that practice is actually illegal if not just simply highly frowned upon because it’s much easier to do shady practices and overcharge people, especially clueless tourists, instead of using something like Didi which negotiates the price automatically before it even connects you with the driver, much like Uber does.

Anyway I found the bus ticket counter here quite easily:

And even decided to actually buy my ticket to get it over with. I carefully explained my situation to the lady, and picked up a ticket from this terminal, Haikou West, to Zhanjiang South, for Feb 27 at 8:30 am.

I could have done this online too, I believe, but wanted to do all this in person because that’s how you learn better and because it’s less likely that I’d end up with the wrong thing on accident. I do actually still have a pending waitlist applkication with trip.com to try to secure a train ticket as well, and while this ticket cost 180 yuan ($35.72 CAD), that train one is $13.85 for a regular seat and $28.98 for a sleeper seat. It actually takes an hour ors o longer than the bus too, and would dump me off at Zhanjiang West, on the outskirst of the city, instead of this bus station in town. However, I didn’t cancel the waitlist request because it’s cheap anyway and because if I do get that, I might actually want to take that anyway to see the trains get decoupled and recoupled. Plus, I am not sure if the train passengers actually need to get off at the port crossing, I didn’t see a place for that over at Nangang Port, so I am kind of curious for that too. Tickets for shorter stops along a longer haul route supposedly open up 24-48 hours before the trip in batches or something, and trip.com thinks that I have a 25% chance of getting a ticket, so I’ll let it ride.

After acquiring my ticket, I wandered around the vicinity of the station, taking in the sights and sounds. There were tons and tons of constant vehicle honking, so that mostly covered the sound part of it, but some of the sights that struck me as neat included:

I had lunch/dinner at a random place called Lanzhou Pulled Noodles, after trying to eat at another nearby store that one of my apps had suggested but failed to tell me that it was closed:

The store was empty of customers and was manned by a surly boy who was more interested in his phone than paying attention to customers, and an older man who was delighted when I told him that the Beef Stew Pulled Noodles was excellent after I was done with my meal:

This store also reminded me of other China quirks — restaurants and eateries often have dustbins beneath each table for customers to throw away tissues and other things in, and unlike Singapore and Japan, eateries here often actually provide packs of tissue paper for guests to use.

I took a second Didi back to the mall where my hotel was after this. It was past 5 pm and they had told me that they would let me know when my hotel room was ready to be checked into, and the official check in time was 3pm anyway, but the WeChat group chat with 8 staff members hadbeen amazingly quiet throughout the day. I poked them and immediately got a response saying that the room was ready but that I had to go collect my luggage. I did so, noting that there were now many other bags waiting at that 17th floor staging area, but that they were all just kind of sitting there, explosed and ready to be taken by anyone passing by. And it was a public enough corridor, as food delivery drivers, for one, were constantly popping in and out of the various floors that the extremely run-down and creaky elevator served, including that floor. Oh well, I guess that’s what security cameras are for. Mine was way in the back since I had been the first one here today anyway, so I waded in, grabbed my bags, and wheeld them off to my room.

I opened the door to my room and was immediately faced with this:

Rude. There wasn’t even a shoe area or anything on the other side of the door, just immediate stairs. I dragged my 20 kg suitcase up one step at a time and then surveyed the land:

The view from this 15th floor window was pretty good:

I was obviously higher up than the “15th floor” of the other buildings around me, and seeing the stairs that I had to climb, it was easy to surmise why, a lot of the levels were probably double the height of a normal one or something. The elevator went high enough that swallowing to pop my ears once I reached my floor actually did clear a bit of elevation blockage.

The scene looked pretty great at night too:

Felt like a small taste of Las Vegas. The rest of my room looked like this:

The name of the hotel is the Xizhi Audio and Video Hotel, and when I commented to Gemini on the weird check-in procedure (lack of an actual manned desk) and the somewhat hacky nature of everything, even though the room looked pretty good, Gemini mentioned that this was probably a repurposed residential loft unit and that calling it an audio and video hotel is “basically a legal loophole to run a guesthouse (minsu – $民宿$) in a residential building by pretending it’s a ‘private cinema experience.'”. Ha. You know what, that makes sense. Nearly everything on the TV projector was locked behind a premium service that I didn’t want to pay for anyhow.

Thre was also this weird hole.. thing.. on an upper wall that looked like a connection that was just taped up as they didn’t have anything to put into it.

And the marble floor is not dirty per se, but also full of slipper marks from after the last cleaning that might or might not have been me walking around, since the floors were still wet when I came in. Not sure. The unit overall is clean, and there are no flies in the bathroom finally, though I think there’s a couple occasionally doing fly-bys past my bed. I also kind of want to get a hidden camera detector app and figure out how to use it, just for fun, since there’s a projector basically pointing over the bed and onto that projector wall screen too.

There are three elevators that serve this floor, two in a cluster and one more separate from it, and all three elevators are, as I mentioned earlier, extremely run-down and creaky-sounding. I was worried about taking my heavy luggage onto them even though they say they support 1,000 kg. They also contain some amusing, poorly-translated signs:

And the floor numbering system skips 14 here because it’s an unlucky number in Chinese, even though that means it ended up with two floor 13’s.

I was not hungry, but decided to wander down and check out the food courts anyway at night. They had lots of cakes and chicken and just heavy-looking meals that I didn’t feel like having, but I also discovered that they had a Linlee stall there:

So even though I didn’t get any food, I ended up getting some lemonade and a cute duck to go along with it.

The store basically let me pick a duck (it was a sad black duck in a box of identical yellow ones so I picked that) and a headpiece or two from a row of boxes placed out on the counter, even though most of the headpieces were just decorations that didn’t seem like they would actually fit on the duck. I ended up picking those Tigey earbands, and there were three dfferent colours of them that I saw so I took one of each.

I then wandered around the mall, which was shutting down by that time, before heading back to the elevators leading up to my room again. I took a picture of this poor ice cream mascot:

Some tempting mini-Carrotblades:

Showcase cars being manually driven out of the mall through the mall doors for storage purposes:

And a flying Colonel Sanders in the local KFC:

Neat. Some of the mall lights themselves were going off too, even though some stores in the mall were open longer than others, so I skedaddled and went back up to my room to enjoy my first night in Haikou, and a nice bed and double pillows to wash away the fatigue of the past 48 hours.

There’s a lot of “friction” with travelling in China, from not-being able to easily access Google stuff, to a lot of things being locked out when you don’t have a +86 China number, like the Meituan app “accepts” my international Canadian number but fails to send an SMS to it, and outright rejects my Singapore number because of some unknown reason. My hotel also needed me to fill out a second form to register my presence in the city to the government, but that one also required an SMS that I could not receive on my phone, so who knows what will happen with that. And all that is before all the translation stuff, though I had an advantage in that since I know some Chinese at least. It’s still a struggle in places though, much like it is whenever I go to Japan.

But wow are things cheap here. I mentioned earlier on in the blog post wanting to post a list of the things I spent money on today, and how much it all cost, and it looks like this:

Airport bus ticket — 20 yuan ($3.97 CAD)
Damage deposit — 100 yuan ($19.84 CAD)
Train ticket — 6 yuan ($1.19 CAD)
Bottled drink — 4 yuan ($0.79 CAD)
Didi ride #1 — 24.2 yuan ($4.80 CAD)
Bus ticket for Friday — 180 yuan ($35.72 CAD)
Lunch (Beef stew noodles) — 18 yuan ($3.57 CAD)
Didi ride #2 — 15 yuan ($2.98 CAD)
Another bottled drink and a pack of 6 tetra-paks — 13.8 yuan ($2.74 CAD)
Linlee drink and duck — 19 yuan ($3.77 CAD)

And my room itself cost $79.26 CAD total for all 3 nights that I’m here, total. There are more expensive options of course, but for the price and the location this is great!