Sanya HaiYueBay holiday hotel

The hotel feels a bit old and untidy, and the pool is often dirty. Service is acceptable but not great, and nobody speaks English. The beach is across the road, about a five-minute walk away, but there are no sun loungers.

The best thing here was the pharmacy next door. The pharmacist speaks Russian, can explain things and show you around, and can take you on a tour, help you find inexpensive fruit, or treat you if needed. His tea was the cheapest in town and better quality than what we found at 30 other tea shops. If you take the free tour, remember the shark-fat trick where it looks like the container dissolves. Don’t hurry to buy the capsules, the pharmacist can show the same trick with ordinary fish oil. That was about the last of my enthusiasm, and it’s only part of the experience. The room at least had working air conditioning, and if you cover the left side and look ahead, the sea is beautiful. But the room looked renovated without being painted, the bed was hard, the shower and toilet door was transparent, and it smelled of sewage. The signs by the elevator buttons mention a gym and restaurant, but both are closed. A 100 yuan deposit was taken at entry. Staff spoke neither Russian nor English, and the only person available was a Rustour guide, whom you had to track down. The beach itself is a narrow strip without sun loungers, and insects are active there for six months of the year. They bite and lay eggs for their babies. The pool is a better place to sunbathe. Although a sign says it closes from 11:00 to 15:00, nobody will chase you away. At 11:00 the attendant just takes his container of rice and goes off to lunch. Renovation work was happening everywhere. We could have been woken at 8 a.m. on a Saturday by a drill behind the wall. Even if the hotel renovations finish, there’s construction right next door: old buildings across a 500x500 square meter area are being demolished and replaced, with builders working shifts and hammering from dawn to dusk. Breakfast was a nightmare. The buffet tables are in the middle of the room, but the food was very cheap, bland local rice dishes: rice buns with a Jerusalem artichoke aroma, slimy rice noodles, stewed Chinese cabbage, tasteless cabbage stalks, more boiled rice, and warm rice water. We ended up driving 12 km to Starbucks for breakfast. If you’re an early riser and like walking, that’s another quirk to keep in mind.

The room had free WiFi, towels, toiletries, a refrigerator, and a TV. I also had a safe, though not every room does. Cleaning was poor, and the floors looked like they hadn’t been washed. Breakfast was awful, with no real choice beyond rice in different forms. They even handed out an egg at the entrance, after you first had to get a ticket from reception. Since the staff only spoke Chinese, asking for the ticket meant a lot of miming and gesturing. There was no tea either.

The location was the best part: a 2-3-minute walk to the sea, with plenty of cafes and shops nearby and a bus stop close too. The bed was very wide and comfortable. I stayed in a so-called villa rather than the main building, in a second-floor double room overlooking the pool. It had a wardrobe, two tables, two armchairs, a TV, telephone, safe, kettle, hair dryer, refrigerator, and air conditioning. There were far more drawbacks. The furniture was shabby, and the air conditioner barely managed the small room, which got sun all day through its glass wall. The refrigerator didn’t work at first, then it was either repaired or replaced. Cleaning was irregular and poor. There were only four hangers for two people, and nowhere to dry wet swimsuits, so we had to spread them on the table. The bathroom had no separate shower or toilet area, not even a curtain, so showering soaked everything, including the toilet, towels, paper, and trash can. Breakfast was the worst part. It was purely Chinese food and didn’t suit European standards at all. There was no meat or dairy, just bland rice boiled into a paste, steamed instant noodles, mushy vegetables, and spicy, salty snacks made from unknown ingredients. The tea and coffee were more like garbage. The only edible things were the daily hard-boiled egg and a few kinds of bread handed to each person. Later they started frying eggs sunny side up.