The Island at the End of the World: Page 3

didn't linger in Haikou. The only interesting thing that happened during my brief stay was when a local sidled up to me and asked in Chinese if I knew where the post office was. "No," I said guardedly - this might have been an example of Haikou humour, after all - "I'm a foreigner." There are those who might have been tempted to turn this into a subtle put down of the "Are you blind or something?" variety, but I was personally touched by this little gesture of inclusion. The Chinese were beginning to accept me as one of their own.

There are two routes to Sanya from Haikou. The first is a three-hour highway job that follows the coast; the second is a scenic cross-island road over the mountains and through minority villages. I took the second. Three hours outside Haikou, the driver of my minibus was arrested and taken away for not having a driving licence - something I'd suspected early on in the trip. This provided a perfect opportunity for a nearby minority village to arrive en masse and prod and poke me and mutter things like "Look at the size of his nose" in their local dialect. It was all good-natured fun, the other passengers explained - "The same thing would happen to us if we went to your country" - and I finally made it to Sanya, dusty and bruised, 10 hours later.