Day 24 -- Sanya, China

We got up early again to meet Caddie at 9:30am for our “local tour.” About ten minutes before we were supposed to meet her, we got a text message saying to wear shorts and bring clean clothes. We new there was a hike, but not entirely sure what this was all about. Dad was feeling sick, so he decided to stay at the hotel. The rest of us went down to meet Caddie, still wearing pants, and asked what the deal was about the text message. She finally explained that we would be hiking through water, with bad knees and each of us only bringing one pair of shoes, we opted out. I think we would have liked to see some of the sights, but I don’t think any of us were disappointed about missing another local lunch. Mom went back to her room and Daniel and I stayed downstairs to eat breakfast. Just as we were finishing up, Mom and Dad came down as he was starting to feel a little better. We enjoyed the weather poolside for a while and decided to walk over to a nearby street market. Headed down to the beach and walked around a while, had some ice cream, and then went back to our hotel. A while later we walked to the Holiday Inn for lunch. It was very warm outside while we were eating, so Daniel and I decided we wanted to go swimming again. Finished up lunch, walked back to our hotel, and then let our food settle for a bit. By the time we got to the pool, it had cooled considerably. Daniel swam and I dangled my feet in. I decided to stay out of the pool and read for a bit. Headed back up to the room and tried to help mom book our hotel for Hong Kong. She finally decided to book one for one night so we would at least have a place to stay when we got there. If the accommodations were okay, then we could extend the stay. If they were bad or the location was inconvenient, then we would try to find something else. After booking the hotel, she came across another site with some reviews. It turns out that this is the hotel that SARS was traced back to in Hong Kong a few years back. Of course we all harassed her about it, but this could be possibly one of the better places to stay as I’m sure they’ve taken extra precautions since then. I’ve been in touch with my friend Connie who is from HK. We met in Portland through a friend/ classmate of mine who used to work with her at Nike in HK. When she is in town, we usually hang out at least a couple times. Anyway, we didn’t think we were going to be able to meet up because she is heading to Shanghai to visit a friend during the time we planned on being in HK. Turns out that the train we were going to take from Haikou (North side of Hainan Island) to Guangzhou to HK is full, so we will be flying there instead. This puts us in a day earlier than the train, so we should be able to see each other tomorrow for dinner or something. We decided to take a walk around to find someplace different for dinner. We checked the menu in a few hotels as we passed by, but ended up walking a kilometer and a half away to the Resort Horizon hotel. There wasn’t anyone else in the restaurant (it was after 9:00pm by the time we got there). The only other people we saw down there was about a hundred or more people attending a McDonald’s Operations Meeting. They had catering, music, and entertainment and were quite loud in the courtyard next to the restaurant. Gave us something to watch during dinner anyway. We walked back to the hotel, of course with many taxis honking along the way, and went to bed by midnight.