Let me start off this article by saying that Haikou is a pretty boring city. At first, I thought I just couldn’t find much information on Haikou tour attractions, but when I got here, I realized that there’s a good reason why I couldn’t find much information on Haikou’s tour attractions – because there aren’t any.
Okay, there are very few tourist attractions in Haikou.
My original plan was to visit the 海南热带海洋世界 (Tropical Ocean World) in Haikou, but it turns out that it’s only open during specific times of the year or for special occasions. So there goes that plan. So I skip forward to my tour plan for day #2, which was to tour 万绿园 (Evergreen Park), 秀英古炮台 (XiuYing Historical Cannons Site), 五公祠 (Wugong Temples), and 金牛岭公园 (Golden Ox Park).
Inside the Evergreen Park are rows and rows of palm trees and other tropical trees and plants.
This is how it went: We took a taxi from our hotel to Evergreen park, which cost about $30yuan. Because it was a rainy day, not many people were about. After the Evergreen Park, we took a taxi to 秀英古炮台 (Xiuying Historical Cannons site), and of course, it was closed. However, even if it was open, I don’t imagine there would be much to see at all there, seeing it was located in a seemingly rundown area of town. So we took the same taxi and headed to the Golden Ox Park.
The golden ox perched on top of the small cliff. Besides that, there wasn't much else to see.
Other than having a golden ox perched on a cliff, there really isn’t much else to see. There was a ticket booth at the entrance, but seems like they don’t even care about collecting the entrance fee.
Another disappointment.
Next up, we headed to Wugong Temple in Haikou. After paying the $20yuan entrance fee, we headed inside. There was a large billboard with a map of the Wugong Temple. Looking at the map, it seemed to me that the Wugong temple was huge, but boy was I wrong. I think they should shrink that map by about a factor of 10. Inside were some old temples and a museum of various periods in Chinese history that’s totally unrelated to the Wugong Temple.
Inside the Wugong Temple.
Having done all of above in half a day's time, we were left wondering “what next?”
Then I took out my tour map of Haikou and saw another bookmarked tour site called Hai Rui Muo (Tomb of Hai Rui). So we decided we would go there. Although the Tomb of Hai Rui isn’t a very large tourist attraction, it was the only worthwhile site we toured.
When I have a little more time, I’ll post more photos and more details about several of these tour attractions in Haikou. Afterwards, we headed to Ming Zhu Guang Cang (People’s Cultural Plaza) for some shopping and lunch.
Ming Zhu Guang Cang - one of the most busy shopping districts of Haikou.
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