A Weekend In Paradise... Sanya, China!

It is almost time for our next vacation!! Yippie... Great Wall of China here we come :) As we are planning for our Beijing trip and getting reservations set, I realized I still have not posted about our last vacation to SANYA! Our trip to Sanya was so wonderful and relaxing! Sanya is considered Chinas Hawaii! Its at the very very southern tip of China! We went as far down as you can go here, which was fun! It was deffinitely a tropical paradise! Our journey to Sanya was an adventure! We started out with a 10 hour bus ride, which should seem really awful, but that long of a ride does not even phase me anymore! We rode a sleeper bus which is always nice! Its like a big sleepover with a bunch of random strangers! The only way to describe the bus would be the Night Bus on Harry Potter!
We get pretty silly after a few hours on the bus

I used the bathroom on the bus for the first time, and oh was that an experience!! Imagine an old bus going down a bumpy old road swaying back and forth and then trying to use a squatter toilet through all of this! :) Its great! During the middle of the night we had a drunk guy take over our head teachers bed because he was too drunk to climb up into his!
After 10 hours on the bus they made us get off and put all our luggage onto another bus... but then they would not let us get onto the bus! We were not really sure what was going on, but we had to wait in a building for awhile to find out we were taking a ferry and hopefully our bus was coming on the ferry with us! It was pretty interesting getting off not knowing if we would see our luggage every again! :) We did find our bus and after another 5 hours on that bus we made it to Sanya!
It was so fun to wake up and look out the window... and there is the ocean!! :) It is gorgeous, and I have never been to Hawaii but it seems to compare well!

As soon as we got into our rooms and unpacked we headed straight to the beach and stayed there all day!! The ocean was very fun to play in, because it was SO WARM! We even found a nice empty spot so we felt like we had the whole beach and ocean to ourselves!! Walking around on the beach we saw a lot more white people than expected :) It was interesting to find out that Sanya is actually where a lot of the Russians go for their vacation! So we met people from all over there!


It was really intersting to be walking down the beach and have it be so nice and beautiful, but then walking down the stree to our hostel it was the old China, people living on the streets, down alleyways with barely anything. It was sad the conditions these people live in.

We took a bus into town :) In Zhongshan we have seated buses and you rarely have to stand up in the aisles, but these buses were mostly standing room only and you were packed in next to everyone else! Good thing we all like each other, but it is crazy how many people they will squeeze onto one bus!!

Downtown was a lot more rundown and creepy than we are used to! We liked it :) We were searching for a place to eat and all the restraunts were little holes in the wall and everyone had bare feet with them up on the tables, food everywere! Dogs running around eating the food off the ground, you know you are not in America at that point :D Its fun to see places like this so you can appreciate where you are from!!
The ride back to our hostel was the best!! We got one of the carts where your driver is on a motorized bike and you sit behind! We had so much fun with it, we were laughing the whole way back and taking pictures. Our driver would stick his head back to try and be in the picture with us and he was laughing at us laughing! Its silly experiences like this that make us all happy!!

Yes Andrea is sitting on our laps, we didn't really fit, but we only wanted to pay for 1 so we just squeezed us all in!! :D
It felt so good to go back and talk a walk down the beach at night! This photo was an attempt for us to get a picture with us and the water at night.. it was sort of a fail- and I am not sure what face i am pulling :)


We thought about going swimming that night, for some reason it sounded exciting :) But I am really excited we decided against it, becaus the next morning I found a dead Jellyfish on the beach!! Pretty sure he would have been waiting to get me if I would have gone in!! I did touch it he he! It could not sting me, because it was dead!!

The next day was actually easter, our first easter away from home. But if you have to be away, why not spend it away on the beach!! It was a good Easter and we tried to spread the hoppiness around :)

Here is a photo especially for all of you you!!! :) :) :)

Again we played around on the beach! Just sitting on the beach you will have women come up and try forcing you to buy from them! Most of them had mangos and coconuts, some women had jewlery! We were suckered into it all :) The mangos were delicious and so it was actually really nice having them come along throughout the day so you could always have a mango if you wanted one!

Joey and I found skidoos, so we pretended to ride them, which was fun, probably not as fun as it was for our head teacher and her husband who actually took them out one the ocean!

The rest of the trip was really fun! We burried Joey in the sand, drank coconuts on the beach and just explored the area!! It was an amazing vacation and I LOVE the Ocean!!