Wuzhizhou Island

Lia found Wuzhizhou Island on a diving forum at two in the morning, one of those threads where someone posts three photos and disappears. We’d already been in Sanya a week, lazy and sunburned, when we finally took the twenty-minute ferry out from Haitang Bay. I remember gripping the rail as the boat rocked harder than I expected, the mainland shrinking behind us, and this small green shape ahead that the coastline maps had shown as barely a comma of land — 1.5 square kilometers, someone had told me, shaped like a butterfly if you squint at it from a map. It didn’t look like much until we got close enough to see the water change color underneath us.

What struck me first wasn’t the beach, it was the water itself. China rates its scenic areas on a scale, and Wuzhizhou sits at the very top, a 5A designation, the same tier as the Great Wall sections everyone photographs. I didn’t understand why until I was standing waist-deep near the eastern shore, looking straight down through twenty-some meters of visibility at coral I’d assumed only existed in places like the Philippines or Indonesia. Lia had booked us a dive slot for the next morning — this island has been one of Hainan’s main scuba hubs since diving operators set up here in the early 2000s — and that night I couldn’t stop thinking about what we’d seen just snorkeling off the pier.

The dive itself undid me a little. Our instructor, a guy from Guangxi who’d clearly done this ten thousand times, led us along a reef wall where the coral was so intact and so colorful it felt staged, like someone had built an aquarium the size of a stadium. I’m not a strong diver, I get nervous with my ears, but even I could tell this reef system was something rare for the region — one of the healthiest stretches of coral left around Hainan. Afterward we walked up to Sunrise Rock, this cluster of stone facing east where couples apparently gather before dawn, though we went at sunset instead and had it nearly to ourselves, the light doing something orange and ridiculous over the water.

We ended the day on Lover’s Bridge, a narrow wooden crossing strung between two outcrops, and Lia made me stop halfway across so she could take a photo of my hand on the railing, which is exactly the kind of thing she does that I complain about and secretly love. Below us the water was still that impossible pale blue, coral shapes just visible under the surface even in the fading light.

When to go: Aim for September through April — the seas calm down, the heat eases off, and that’s when the water clarity is at its best for diving or just floating face-down off the pier.