And an epilogue in a different photo orientation:

Also here’s a photo of one of the video rooms in question:

There were lots of little artifacts in cases along the way, as well as four stamps, one for each seasonal section of the exhibition hall, but the stamps were largely dry and didn’t look very nice on my sticker book. Much more fascinating to me were these chairs that were left out in the hallway between exhibitions for people to rest on:

There were a lot of Hainan-related exhibitions squirreled away in exhibition rooms on the second and third level of the museum too, like one with this lovely scene:

This was a food exhibition, and of course it featured Hainanese -and- Wenchang chicken rice as two separate dishes:

There was a nice teahouse too:

And in another exhibition hall related to the arts, I liked this instrumental display:

These dolls:

And this opera display:

There were several video presentation type exhibits in the place, like this one:

And re-creations like this one of a poor critter getting roasted over the campfire to become someone’s lunch.

And then there was the museum gift shop, where they had a bunch of normal goods on display:

But I could also buy a guqin for 48,000 yuan ($9,604.23 CAD). I don’t have THAT much purchasing power!

And other uh, interesting stuff that I guess are made out of local “rare” materials.

I didn’t buy any of that. I did buy these for $5 CAD a piece, as I really liked this art, and fridge magnets are always nice.

It’s always nice when admission to a museum doesn’t itself cost $20 and leave me with no appetite for souvenirs. Once I fled with my loot, I saw that the number of stalls outside the museum had doubled or tripled:

Ignoring them, I called another Didi and took it to another much suggested place, possibly the most touristy location in the city, Qilou Old Street. I had no idea of knowing this at the time, and I’m not sure my driver really realized it either, but the road running along the north side of this area was packed, bumper to bumper, during whatever time of the day I was headed there. Rush hour? Or perpetually like this because tourists? Who knows.

The entire road was bright red on my driver’s app to indicate bad traffic, and in the end she and I decided she’d just drop me off nearby and I’d walk the rest of the way. She was the first and only lady driver I saw in my first 3 days in the city, and also had a neat transparent roof in the car that looked like it could be slid back and opened like a sunroof if desired.

Anyway, the scene I captured shortly after I left the car pretty much shows the nasty traffic there. Fully backed up lane of cars on the left, fully backed up lane of motorcycles on the right, and pedestrians in the middle trying to figure out how to cross over to the pedestrian path on the right.

Motorcycles never get backed up. Motorcycles! They drive between lanes and on pavements and weave in and out between pedestrians here! How crowded was this place to have motorcycles backed up?!

The actual Qilue Old Street, once I got around to it, looked something like this on the north end:

Horse!

There were a number of side streets to go down, and promptly found and hired a caricature artist. Yay, more drawings of Tigey to add to the collection! This one became the 11th one I have of the little guy, and I captured this humorous picture of him seemingly looking surprised at seeing Tigey perched on the chair in front of him:

While the portrait itself cost 20 yuan, he offered to add colour for an additional 10 more yen, and I agreed. Tourist prices, by the way, since the entire car ride here through the traffic jam cost only 17.4 yuan ($3.47). The vendor next to the artist was selling bead jewellery or something but was also smitten by Tigey and took several pictures of him too. I don’t blame him!

In my entire stay in Haikou, this artist and transaction was the only instance I ran into of someone that did not accept digital forms of payment like Weixin/Wechat, and wanted actual cash. I had a couple hundred yuan with me as leftover from my last trip to China two years ago but have felt absolutely no pressure at all to go convert or withdraw more at an ATM. This is unlike both Singapore and Japan, where bringing a bit of paper currency is necessary. I didn’t actually have exact change for this guy though, so I handed him a 50 yuan note, and after some exchanges with the aforementioned bead vendor next to him (who hides his money in a red packet inside his cart, psst), I acquired my change to go with this fancy portrait of my white puffball:

I like it. I’ll have to trim and scan it better once I’m back at Singapore. I asked for the artist to sign his name too and his signature reads Sancai Art. I don’t know about the date though. It’s 2026-02-26. And the 10th of the first month in the Chinese lunar calendar. Maybe he’s using an esoteric calendar invented from Tigey‘s nonexistent tail pointing at a quadrant of the sky. Or maybe the 2026 part is actually 2-26 and represents today’s date and no, that doesn’t make any sense either.

But that’s fine! The imperfections of the artist make up part of the soul of the picture, just like the little heart he put to cover up a “2” since he started writing the date on that side of the signature initially and then thought better of it.

He rolled up the image and gave it to me, but the rubberband promptly snapped, which was actually better in the end anyway since I have my Surface Pro’s protective box that I talked about way back at the start of the blog series to put it into. It got nice and smoothened out in there while I progressed through the rest of my evening.

Something else besides the rubberband snapped here too — one of strap connections on my sling bag broke, sending it dropping down onto the ground in what thankfully was a safe area. That could have been much, much worse. I’m not sure how the thing actually fits together, and I didn’t figure it out even after quickly examining it. This is the end of the strap that still works fine:

And this is the one that “broke”, but everything still looks to be there, it just doesn’t lock together anymore? Either way I just attached the pieces together with the hook and it basically works the same for now, but very curious. No additional mechanical-type pieces of the bag fell onto the ground that I saw.

Well, whatever. I went off and continued to wander Qilue Old Street since I was here. This area very much reminded me of Chinatown in Singapore — they still sell things like groceries and food but are also heavily touristed, and there was a main thoroughfare or two with particularly large flows of people and more touristy stalls set up there, with people yelling noisily to try and get attention.

Some streets were full of little eateries and restaurants, several of which I could not eat at since they used the Meituan mini-app through WeChat, which I need a +86 China number to access. Oh well. Other streets had vendors that sold snacks, or drinks, or raw seafood, or sundries.

The one difference between this place and similar scenes in Singapore and Taiwan though? Motorcycles everywhere! They didn’t really get captured in the above pictures, but there’ll be a couple below. Food delivery is big in China, and a lot of people drive the gig economy by both ordering food online to be delivered to their homes, as well as using ride-hailing services like Didi. Even in my hotel building, I see food delivery motorcyclists, still with their helmet and mask on, join me in the elevator rides up or down all the time. And they’re everywhere in malls, eateries, and apparently overpacked touristy streets too.

I mean, I guess if I really liked a store in here, I’d do that too so that someone else had to brave the crowd instead of me. It was a constant dance on some of the roads trying to avoid them, and they were only about a third to a half of the number of motorcyclists buzzing around the area and literally weaving between pedestrians. I’m not sure why everyone else who was on a bike in the area was doing so, but I guess if they came here from elsewhere in the city on a bike, they’d continue to use the bike while they were here where possible. And the city has so many motorcyclists in general.

Anyway, I popped into a little cafe named Xinyeji Tangshui Chapu (or Xinyeji Sweet Water Chapu on Amap)  here to enjoy a snack that was also on Gemini‘s suggested list, something named Qingbuliang (清补凉). it’s coconut milk with a bunch of stuff in it, and as the Wikipedia article suggests, it’s somewhat familiar to me from Singapore cuisine too. They had many kinds though, and although I just took the original dish in the end, I did take a picture of their menu and added that below.

It wasn’t bad at all, though it was similar enough to what I think I’ve had in Singapore in the past that it probably isn’t worth a trip out here just to get. The stuff in the milk is different, but not significantly so, but I guess that’s what the other variations are for too.

Next, I wanted dinner and I wanted Hainanese Chicken Rice. I used a combination of Gemini and Amap/Baidu for this one, sourcing suggestions from the first one and directions from the other two. This has something like a 50-50 chance of working from past experience, and less so in China due to incomplete and outdated information, and indeed the first suggestion it gave me was a food hall that was closed, but surprisingly the second one worked and led me to this place:

This place, Haibinfen Hong Kong Tea Restaurant, was a corner store and was set up with a booth right at the corner, with tables out on the pavement in front of the stall, as well as behind it and inside the actual store itself, where I was. There was a kitchen area to the right of the booth in the picture too, I believe, and an upstairs seating area that I heard them talking about. Their menu looked like this:

Mmm. I ordered Hainanese Chicken Rice for 28 yuan, and it came looking like this:

How interesting and weird! I’ve not had stewed cabbage in Hainanese Chicken Rice before, and that sauce mixture on the side was a mix of lime, garlic, and a couple of sauces. It was not the HCR (can I abbreviate this? sue me) that I was used to, even though the chicken portion was correct, but it was interesting. I also ordered wintermelon and clam soup for 22 yuan, and this bowl was way too big:

But I ended up eating all the wintermelon and all the little bits of meat on the clam and as many little green onions as I could, and left the remaining soup. This was good too, and had a peppery tinge to it. I actually used the wintermelon to mop up the lime-garlic sauce in the end, and that went pretty well too.

But I was glad to finally have a good/interesting Hainanese Chicken Rice/Wenjiang Chicken Rice meal of some kind, and I hailed a cab and got home without incident, ending the night. Not. That never happens for me. See, the issue was that I was still in the middle of Qilue Old Road at this point. It was so “in the middle” that I believe that there was a freaking map of the place engraved on the ground, drenched in water, and it is actually partially visible in the booth picture with the two blue chairs above. On the left of the booth, there’s a woman in a brown dress, and a man in a black shirt behind a lamp post, with a child in tow. At their feet is a raised piece of ground that’s a lighter shade of brown than the surrounding map. Right? THAT’S THE MAP.

At least, I believe so, as I watched several people interact with it, rubbing it with their feet, looking around for landmarks to orient themselves, and so on. I didn’t actually exit that way to take a look at it because this is what the road looked like by the time I was leaving, from across the road:

Nope. And the main thing is, there’s no way a car would be able to get anywhere near here to pick me up. The closest road was to the north, but that was where I had been dropped off earlier, and that was a ridiculous logjam too. I decided to walk off west and south, in search of a quieter road. This actually eventually brought me to some quieter paths, still within the Qilou area, but with significantly less people. There was this street of people selling upscale-ish clothing in bright, clean stores, for example.

And a path that was surprisingly full of vendors but had very little foot traffic.

It turned out that the reason for this is that that short path ended at a temple called Xitian Temple:

Hm, neat. Going around it and to the south took me into darker side alleys:

And thinner side alleys:

AND EVEN IN HERE I had to dodge multiple motorcycles.

But I guess that’s also partially what keeps the area “safe”. I’m not really sure if some of these places were just straight up residential at this point without shops attached, but I had a neat experience here, walking with the cool breeze nipping at my heels, and passing a building blaring out a nice song that I had never heard before but certainly enjoyed. Although I have been trying to collect Google Assistant song identifications of nice songs as I go, and this is something I’ve done ever since my South Korean trips in the mid 2010s, I plain forgot to try to get one of this song until the very end of it, until it was too late. I tried humming it though, but the first two attempts found no matches at all, which made me a little sad. I sped up my humming tempo a bit and it actually managed to find the song on that third try though, so here it is for posterity’s sake.