The first prize is a weekend at one of Sanya’s five-star resorts. The prize includes flights to and from Sanya from anywhere in Asia, plus two nights in a five-star hotel, plus 5,000 RMB in cash.

To enter the competition, all you have to do is shoot a video that has a Waboba ball in it somewhere, preferably with it bouncing on water.

Feeling inspired? Maybe you think you could do better than Nate and Brendan’s video for the Surf and Skate.

For full details of the competition, click here.

And what a bubble it is. Prices here doubled overnight.

We’ve been building the website for the event, and if all goes according to plan (assuming there’s a 3G signal at Mama’s Restaurant in Riyuewan), we’ll be broadcasting online live commentary, plus photos and videos, from the event.

We’ve gone all fancy and hi-tech with our feeds for the event, so if you have a website, blog, facebook page or the like, you can embed a live broadcast of the event on your site with this snazzy little widget here. There’s also a Chinese language version coming soon.

Last year’s event was a breeze and a gas, and this year’s promises to be bigger and better, so if you fancy your chances in the toppling winter surf, or if you just want a great weekend away, go on and sign yourself up for the event as either a competitor or a spectator.

For more info contact Brendan at Surfing Hainan.

We’re not letting you off lightly. Pack up your guts, trunks, bikini, shades, SPF30 and your best sense of adventure. You’ve got things to do before the rocking starts at the First Annual Sanya Music Festival…

For full details, click here.

I Dreamed a Dream

Mario’s report is a handy overview of the market and the pricing in the various parts of town, and a rehearsal of the argument that surging demand for a place in the sun could keep local property prices rising for a good while to come.

But what’s with all of the frantic building, especially on second-tier sites set well back from the beach? Is it waving or drowning? It wasn’t so long ago that we were hearing predictions of widespread bankruptcies among Chinese property developers.

As this report from Caijing hast it, these risks have not gone away. Interestingly, one of the article’s examples is an Agile Property Holdings project worth 20 billion yuan just up the coast from Sanya City at Clearwater Bay.

Agile, the article claims, was unable to leverage financing for the deal and was forced to sell a project stake instead. It is now said to be under heavy pressure to accelerate the project by several years in order to deliver the return demanded by private equity investors and prevent these investors pulling out.

It’s a story with what sounds like a familiar ring to it. There’s an enormous amount of building going on in and around Sanya at the moment, and supply particularly of second-tier property is surging, but are all of these developers really that bullish about the Sanya property market in the near term or are they just trapped in a frantic race against their debts?

Segway Sanya Style

In the Sanya beach style happenin’, the cool points are all with the Segway now, that sleek combination of übermodern silent mobility, gravity defiance and spinning gyros.

Gently lean forward and you’re hurtling toward the sea with no sign of stopping. A subtle wiggle of the hips and you’re whizzing impressively past the bronzed Russians in their bikinis. Another wiggle and you’re up at the ice cream counter ordering two Cornettos.

All it needs now is a cup holder.

For the vertically inclined, the Segway is now available for 20-minute rides on Yalong Bay beach in front of the Sheraton Sanya Resort at a cost of 200 yuan per time. For more information, contact Sanya Zero Tourism on 0898 38283300 or 13925008823.

Sea, Sky and Windsurfer

And Flaubert was right, of course, because as any sailor, surfer, windsurfer or kitesurfer will tell you, the sun is actually there to make the wind blow and the waves topple over.

Warm winds have blown through Sanya for nearly a month now, so we recently doused ourselves in sunscreen and headed off to Sanya Bay to try out the latest on offer in sailing and windsurfing.

Competition is hotting up in the windsurf rental market, with the grandly-named Sanya Sailing Windsurfing Association now going head-to-head with the grander-named Sanya International Windsurfing & Sailing Club.

Although both are decidedly under-equipped, the latter beats the former by an “International”, a beach hut, a harness and a 6.9-metre Simmer sail. The name advertises global ambitions. The equipment says not yet.

The Sanya Sailing Windsurfing Association runs the sailing and windsurfing in Dadonghai and in Sanya Bay opposite Coffee Time and Fat Daddy’s. For several weeks now, as the East winds continued to blow, the association’s boards and catamaran have sat idle on Dadonghai Beach, with no sign of anyone there to rent them out.

The Sanya International
Windsurfing & Sailing Club

Nonetheless, it is worth making the trip to the International Windsurfing & Sailing Club, situated on Sanya Bay beach in front of the Howard Johnson Resort, not least for the use of a newish Simmer sail and a board that doesn’t slip away from underneath you.

We’ve been told that the club’s windsurf equipment is actually the best on offer in the whole of Sanya, including Yalong Bay.

More fun than a catamaran

Dinghy rental at the club is 500 RMB for an hour. Windsurfer rental at both the club and the association is 200 yuan per hour or 300 yuan for a full day.

The Sanya Sailing Windsurfing Association has a base at the Western end of Dadonghai Bay (look for the catamaran sail), and in Sanya Bay in front of Coffee Time and Fat Daddy’s. Contact Andy Zhuang (庄加强) by mobile at (0)13976283213.

The Sanya International Windsurfing & Sailing Club has a beach hut in front of the Howard Johnson Resort in central Sanya Bay. Call Call Zhen Ke Xue on (0) 13976962036. There’s also a fixed line number: 0898 88671575.

Fat Daddy's Fit Daddy

The turning point for Sheldon Habiger, one of the founding partners of Element Fresh, came on a damp January day in Shanghai, 2006.

After eight years in Shanghai, and two weeks before the start of the ear-splitting pyrotechnics to welcome the Year of the Dog, Sheldon watched his young son – suffering from asthma and allergies and intermittently deaf – walk a few short steps and then stop in exhaustion.

Enough was enough. “We have to leave,” Sheldon said to his wife, Linda. “We just have to go.”

It is a point that many sinophiles (ourselves included) are reaching during their time in China. After years spent working hard and playing hard in China’s big cities, learning Mandarin and accumulating valuable China experience, the arrival of children provides a sudden and often stark demonstration of the need to live in a less polluted environment.

It presents a person with some difficult choices.

“My son was at the point where he was sick 70-80 percent of the time,” explains Sheldon. “He had asthma and allergies really bad and I knew what that was like. I knew what was causing it was the pollution.

“When you have a child that’s sick 70-80 percent of the time your life is hell. It’s no fun. He couldn’t walk five feet. He couldn’t breathe.”

But where to go? As with most Sino-foreign couples, passport and visa issues were restricting their choices. Sheldon is a US citizen and Linda is Shanghainese with a Chinese passport.

The obvious choice was to stay in China somewhere. It needed to be warm because they knew that their son’s health deteriorated in the cold. “And the key was no pollution,” said Sheldon. “You know very well that anywhere on the mainland just doesn’t fit that criterion.”

Despite having never been to Hainan, Sheldon, Linda and their young son and daughter packed up their bags and moved to Sanya just after Chinese New Year, 2006.

Fat Daddy's: Element Fresh Air

And living in one of the very few places in China with clean air and blue skies, they watched their son’s health gradually improve and his hearing return.

It is a story that is increasingly familiar to the small, but growing, foreign community in Sanya. For increasing numbers of people, this sunny city at the very southern tip of Hainan Island is one of the very few places in China that provides a satisfactory answer to the question, “Where next?”

For somebody, for example, who came to China in the nineties, spent years learning Mandarin, probably has a local spouse and Mandarin-speaking children and enjoys China’s mad energy and contradictions as much as its opportunities, the prospect of having to leave the country for the sake of the children can be quite a jolt.

Sanya provides a pollution-free opportunity to continue the ride, to stay on the bus, to take things further.

Although the health and education systems in Sanya are extremely basic, increasing numbers of foreigners are finding ways of coping with this. Sheldon himself is about to launch a small school for foreign children aged 6 to 11.

“It’s like the movie,” he says. “If you build it, they will come.”

And would he ever consider moving back to Shanghai? “No,” he says. “You couldn’t pay me enough to make me go back.”

“Shanghai is an amazing city, but it’s very one dimensional…. You work hard you play hard. I would not want to ever have a family there,” he says.

Fat Daddy’s serves pizzas, burgers, ribs, salads, smoothies, and the old Element Fresh staple, pumpkin soup.
You’ll find it at:
No.1 Villa, Lan Hai Hua Yuan,
Sanya Wan Lu, Sanya
Tel: 0898 88391046
三亚湾路兰海花园二期商铺一号别墅

The hotel, if you can call it that, consists of three treehouses in the wooded grounds of the Nanshan Leisure Villas, which is itself a hotel. Situated at the edge of a clearing in the tamarind rainforest, the treehouses are fun, sturdy, neatly varnished and would make for a great weekend out in the wild.

With pricing ranging between 580 and 980 RMB per night, depending on your tree of choice, a stay in a treehouse is not as cheap as you might expect, especially when you add on the 150 RMB entry fee for the Nanshan Cultural Tourism Zone, but when you book a tree you are in fact booking exclusive access to the neighbouring beach and surrounding rainforest, which are closed to the public during your stay.

This gives you, in the forest clearing, a bar and breakfast area, a giant swing and a barbeque spot, all for your private use. You also get full access to the facilities at the Nanshan Leisure Villas, including the swimming pools.

The best value treehouse is almost certainly the one priced at 780 RMB per night, which has bed space for a family of four, as well as running water, a shower room and what has to be China’s only fully-functional, sit-down, flushing toilet in a tree. This is also the tree with a view, being no more than ten paces from the top of the dune that leads down to the sea.

All of the treehouses have mosquito netting, but since the rooms themselves are mainly for sleeping in, you will need to come armed with mosquito repellent for use in the public spaces. Bugs will be fewer in the Winter months.

The official treehouse website is here.

The phone number for Nanshan Leisure Villas is: 0898 88837779.

Photo by: Perfect2 Wedding Photography

In the middle of Sanya Bay, between the rambling edge of the city and the start of the up-market hotels, there’s a long, flat stretch of beach that advertises elsewheres.

The tour buses don’t stop here, driving on up the beach road past sun-bleached billboards promoting villa developments further up the coast.

Here, there are no swimmers, no surfers, no buckets and spades, and hardly any fishermen. You would be forgiven for not noticing the place at all. A flat beach meets a flatter sea.

And yet, this particular stretch of beach just happens to be one of the most fiercely photographed panoramas in the whole of China. Collective wisdom has it that this is one of the very best places in the country for the taking of wedding photographs.

I happened to be there on the day that China announced its worst economic growth since modern records began. If that is the kind of news that might put a damper on a young person’s wedding plans, there was no sign of it here.

The place was littered with dashing grooms and blushing brides – at intervals along the beach, posing along the roadside wall, stepping out of vans, stepping into vans, under the palm trees, crouching in bushes, posing at a fake white piano – all dressed in the collective regalia of young love.

Patty, who runs Perfect2, one of the local wedding photo shops, says that about 100 couples a day have their wedding photographs taken in Sanya, most of them on this section of Sanya Bay.

Even with the economic downturn, there has been no noticeable let-up in the number of couples buying the service, although more of them have been buying the slightly cheaper packages, priced in the thousands of RMB, rather than the deluxe packages, priced in the tens of thousand.

You do not need to be a mathematical genius to work out that that amounts to roughly 36,500 couples a year, and that this unassuming service could be bringing more than 100 million RMB a year into the local economy

At the water’s edge, a bride from Sichuan in full white wedding dress was jumping repeatedly, as the photographer immortalised her, with a snap and a flash, in suspended ballet poses a foot above the beach. Her groom, meanwhile, was fascinated by crabs or worms or something on the beach and was poking at them with the wedding photographer’s brochure.

Further along, past couples posing among the palm trees and in the long grass, a bride in red was draped over an old fishing boat as she held up an oil lantern to her Adonis. Next to them, and past the fake piano, another couple posing against a miniature US letter box made goofy smiles for my benefit. I returned a smile through the back of my camera.

Photo by: Perfect2

The finished photos are lush and beautifully shot, with lots of posing, a fair amount of exuberance, and always plenty of jumping. In the iconography of modern love, it goes without saying that one of the primary attributes required of a happy marriage is weightlessness.

A cynic might wonder what could motivate people to insert themselves, without even a hint of irony, into what are essentially scenes from pop videos and perfume commercials.

A fair number of these photos will hang above the matrimonial bed, so you also have to wonder what it feels like over time to live in the real world and get to see your weightless, imaginary selves floating off into the sunset every night.

With China showing its sharpest economic slowdown on record, and with quite a few commentators questioning the sustainability of the Chinese economic miracle, you also wonder if the Zeitgeist wouldn’t go for wedding photos a little more understated.

But this is China resurgent. “Phooey,” the photos seem to say. “The 21st century belongs to us.”

Many thanks to Patty at Perfect2 Wedding Photography for the free mangoes and for letting us use some of her great photographs. More Pefect2 pix here.