Haikou

Most people treat Haikou as a corridor — an airport, a train transfer, a name on a boarding pass between somewhere else and the resort sand of Sanya four hours south. Lia and I had two days to kill while waiting on a ferry booking that kept slipping, and we spent them walking a city that almost nobody we met seemed to think was worth walking. They were wrong.

The arcades nobody photographs

The old quarter around Bo’ai Road and Zhongshan Road is built from qilou — arcaded shophouses raised by Hainanese who went off to Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam, made money, and came home to build the streets they had seen abroad. The result is a few blocks of crumbling Southeast Asian grandeur: plaster garlands, shuttered upper windows, columns furred with a century of damp. Some have been restored into tidy postcard versions of themselves. The ones I liked were the unrestored stretches, where a hardware shop and a noodle stall and a shuttered ruin sit shoulder to shoulder, ferns growing out of the cornices.

We drank coffee here, repeatedly, because Hainan does coffee in a way the rest of China largely does not — a legacy of those same returnees, who brought back the bean along with the architecture. The old-men teahouses serve it dark, strong and oversweetened with condensed milk, alongside small dishes you keep ordering until you have accidentally eaten lunch. Lia, who treats every café as a research project, declared one of them the best she’d had since Mexico, which from her is close to a knighthood.

Volcanoes on the edge of town

What sold me on Haikou, though, was the ground it stands on. Half an hour south of the centre is the Leiqiong volcanic field — a cluster of dormant craters you can walk into, the most accessible being Ma’anling. We climbed the rim in the late afternoon, the city haze below us and the crater throat green and silent, lined with trees rooting straight into old lava. Nearby villages are built entirely from black volcanic stone: walls, lanes, pig pens, all the same dark porous rock, looking less like construction than something the land grew.

Back in town that evening we ate at a roadside place where the speciality was Wenchang chicken — poached, cooled, served with ginger and rice cooked in its fat — and watched a city that has no need to perform for tourists go about its ordinary tropical night. Scooters, durian sellers, the smell of frangipani and exhaust. Haikou is humid, slightly battered, and entirely unbothered by what you think of it. That indifference is exactly what makes it worth two days.

When to go: October to April for the dry, warmer-but-bearable season. Avoid the late-summer typhoon months unless you enjoy watching rain move sideways. The old streets are best in the soft hour before sunset, when the arcades glow and the heat finally lets go.