Monkey Island

The most memorable day trip that we took during our vacation in Sanya was our visit to Monkey Island.  Monkey Island is quite literally an island full of monkeys that live in a nature reserve that is open to the public.  This story is another example that sometimes nothing seems to go to plan in China. 

We left our hostel (Peter, Jess, and I) after lunch to walk to a bus station so we could catch a ride up to Ling Xue so we could go to Monkey Island.  It took us about an hour and a half to find the station because we kept getting lost.  When we got there the bus station was in pretty bad shape; smelled like gasoline, exhaust, sewage, and cigarettes.  Luckily we only had to wait inside for about ten minutes after purchasing our tickets to board the busses.  We arrived in Ling Xue after about an hour and a half of driving and started to look around for another bus that would take us to Monkey Island.  We couldn’t find the bus that we needed, so instead we crammed into the carriage of a motorcycle taxi.  The forty five minute ride was both pleasant and unpleasant.  We seemed to hit all of the potholes in the road even though I could tell the driver was doing his best to avoid them.  The air we were breathing was a combination of fuel exhaust from the motorcycle, dust from the road and whatever rural China smell was alongside the road.  But we did get to see what most of China (rural and poor) is really like; pigs, chickens, ducks, and gnus roaming freely, lots of demolished buildings and small farm plots.  I kind of enjoyed the ride, but unfortunately for Jess, the ride did not help her migraine head ache that she had acquired earlier in the day.  By late afternoon we arrived at the entrance to Monkey Island. 

We were not too pleased with the price of the entrance tickets once we had arrived, (25 US dollars per person) especially after what we had to go through to get there.  What they are doing is smart; after traveling all the way out in the middle of nowhere they force you to pay a lot of money.  Despite the high price we tried to enjoy our experience at the park.  To get on the island we had to take a spectacular cable car ride that looked out over a beautiful ocean view. 

Monkey Island has tons of monkeys and almost none of them are actually in cages.  Part of the fun is trying to get as close as you can to the monkeys and take a good photo without making them feel too uncomfortable.  Since the monkeys kept going after Jess, Peter and I had to keep scaring them off.  Unfortunately we had arrived so late to the park, so we were only able to stay there for about an hour and a half before it closed.  Now we were going to have to figure out how to get back to Sanya. 

We waited outside of the park for a bus that may or may not come to bring us back into Ling Xue but no bus came.  We started walking up and down the road asking random Chinese people where a bus was but they would each point us in a different direction.  Eventually we asked a motorcycle taxi where the bus was and he told us to get in.  He drove us directly to the bus that we needed after driving us around for a little while.  The bus was an old rickety piece of machinery but we didn’t really have any other choice.  The bus winded its way back to Ling Xue, stopping at severs places in the countryside to drop people off.  We were very relieved to arrive in Ling Xue again, but to add to our imperfect day, we discovered that the bus station was closed.  How were we going to get back to Sanya?  What we had to do was find a taxi (which was rare in this town) and haggle a driver down to a reasonable price to bring us back to Sanya.  After finding a driver, we haggled him down to $33 to drive the three of us the hour and a half drive back to Sanya.  When we got back to our hostel I needed to drink a couple of cold Tsingdao beers to finally relax.

What a day!  Even though nothing seemed to go right, and Monkey Island was not worth the amount of money we had to spend on it, I still enjoy looking back at this adventure.