Perfect for water sports and mouth-watering ingredients
Print Edition
GREENS grown in the wild special to the season and region, fish and shrimps from the rivers and ocean, poultry directly brought by farmers, and home-grown tropical fruits — this scene of the hustle and bustle of a local farmers’ market the early morning is a rare sight in cities now.
So much produce today goes through several levels of distribution before getting a spot at the market.
In Sanya on tropical Hainan Island, it is a delight to smell and experience the freshness and vividness of the wet grocery market, as well as enjoying the extra kudos of being accompanied by an energetic chef who is a walking encyclopedia on how to pick, process and serve the ingredients, and to let your imagination run wild on how they will be cooked and presented on your dinning table within hours.
Grocery shopping with Charlie Xu, executive Chinese chef of the Westin Sanya Haitang Bay Hotel’s Five Sen5es restaurant, is a much-anticipated event soon to be launched by the hotel.
With its renowned 12,000-square-meter tropical waterscapes, the hotel stands out from hundreds of competitors on the island for its increasingly more innovative facilities and events like this.
It’s Sanya, so I couldn’t wait to rush to the beach. But I was confused when I rarely saw anyone in the dozens of swimming pools there. Where have all the excited groups, couples and families in the lobby gone? Didn’t the staff just tell me the hotel is almost fully occupied?
It was only when I got closer to some of the pools that I got a glimpse through gaps in between coconut trees and other tropical plants of the cheering youngsters flying down the newly inflated slides to the water, others chilling out on canoes, or parents perhaps enjoying a relaxing moment in the various massage pools.
The water area is so well designed and split up that I could always find an empty pool somewhere along the way even when all the hotel’s 448 rooms are booked up. One evening, we took the advantage of the vast number of ponds to have a pool-hopping session all the way to the beach.
The greenery is designed to divide the water areas, provide privacy and offer a fun way to explore, especially when you can do so by self-balancing scooters or golf carts.
Every morning, I checked the event-schedule posted in the recreation area. It offered digging for crabs, yoga in the water, cycling around the gardens, cooking classes and sand sculpture sessions, among many others.
The waves at Haitang Bay make it perfect for water sports.
But after I became exhausted from running, swimming and biking all day, it was a pleasant surprise to enjoy a Bali-style massage in the spa.
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