Go to Hainan - 去海南
Access to Hainan is either by flight, rail, boat or coach:-
- Flight - except for a few international direct flights to Sanya, flying to Hainan usually means going via a Chinese hub, Hong Kong, Singapore etc.
- June 2015 - HK Airport 香港机场海天码头 to Fu Yong 福永 ferry (to Shenzhen airport) - air condition blasted out dreadful smell like rat droppings, best avoid.
- Rail -an interesting and remarkable alternative is travelling by rail from Guangdong using the YeuHai (Guangdong–Hainan) Ferry 粤海铁路轮渡 where an entire train is ferried across the sea. It is not easy to find videos about this journey using the English language as search words on the internet so here follows a sample of clips on youtube:
- A short 7 mins TV documentarty 7 on this crossing spoken in mandarin - courtesy of Dixon Yan
- A 4 min clip showing the docking approach - credit to baoathaikou
- Journey from SanYa to HaiKou (17mins) up to boarding a cross harbour railway ferry (2010-08-09) - credit to MTRE213
- Experience of train run onto ferry, (9 mins) Part 2 of above, (2010-08-08) - credit to MTRE213
- On the mainland side, North Harbour at XuWen, 徐闻风光： 奥海铁路北港, a promotional video clip
- Rail from Hung Hom station, Hong Kong to Sanya via Guangzhou is about 15 hours elapsed on sleeper train.
- Once you are at Haikou you may travel to some of the towns using rail services such as this one from HaiKou to SanYa , incredibly there is a sleeper train from Beijing West which travels all the way to SanYa covering an epic journey of 3417km which takes 38 hours, this is shown on this timetable. This is another timetable and travel tips from Sanya Paradise Travel.
- Coach - as usual when there are few passengers at Guangzhou for Xumen 徐闻 Haikou, a coach which only goes as far as Zhanjiang 湛江advertises for Haikou in a dishonest way for about £20 to mislead the few passengers. Luckily there is a frequent rail service from Zhanjiang to Haikou for about £7.
粤海轮渡 YueHai Rail Ferry (opened in 2003)
The area of England is 130,400 km² and the area of Hainan is 33,200 km². (United Kingdom is 230,000 km²)
Hainan to England
The usual routes from Meilan Airport is one of the following methods:-
- via HK and then direct to England,
- via a hub in mainland China e.g. Guangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing etc.,
- via Singapore and then direct to England,
- plus one stop via an airport hub:
- in Scandinavia, e.g. Helsinki
- in Europe, e.g. Frankfurt, Paris, Amsterdam
- in Middle East, e.g. Dubai
- in Turkey using Turkish Airline (this service is quite good from Hong Kong)
- Better fares may be obtained from :-