Sanya

I was going to call this "Rain", but I noticed I had used it twice before already. It was/is the title of one of my favourite Maugham stories (and a play too, in fact) too, so I guess that makes me a careless plagiarist. Anyway, not three times. From this you may deduce that it is raining again. Correct. I'm sheltering in the coffee shop that is exactly halfway between the subway exit and my front door.

It has been a wet week, except Tuesday. We had the annual management conference, this year at the resort "town" Sanya on Hainan. Notionally pretty similar to Guadaloupe - a small island in the tropics with tourism as the sole industry - but no French. Hence much more pleasant. In fact, while it's possible the locals were all rubbing their hands with glee at the amount they could charge tourists for ludicrous things like bathing suits, they (the bathing suits) were in the main on a par with Guangzhou department store prices. Even the hotel prices were not ridiculously ridiculous - although not entirely cheap either.


Actually, it was probably a bit more like Fiji in the early 1970's than Guadaloupe.

And while no doubt it will end up like Surfer's Paradise, it has got a few years to go to achieve that degree of awfulness.

I arrived on Monday, when the hotel was crammed full of Russians continuing a Communist holiday tradition dating back to the 1950's that appears to have survived the 21st century. They seemed to have all vanished by the end of the week - perhaps they have mysterious powers of predicting the weather. (I don't want to make unjustified generalisations, but if the American public health industry is worried about obesity they could try a quick trip to Russia to help them understand that the problem is not their's alone.)

Tuesday the weather was sufficiently pleasant to compel me to test out the swimming pool. On Wednesday it started to rain and didn't stop until 3:27 am on Saturday. I know that because at 3:27 somebody woke me up from my snooze on the airport floor to tell me that my flight was finally boarding. All over the airport people were similarly waking up with a degree of renewed optimism.

I got to the airport at about 6 the previous evening, just after the roof in the check in area had proved inadequate to the task of keeping rain out. People in gumboots were trying to sweep the water out of the terminal, but since the road was also full of water there wasn't really anywhere for it to go. Would-be passengers removed their shoes and rolled up their trousers to queue in giant puddles and check in their luggage. Then it was just a question of staking out a spot on the floor and waiting. Curiously the floor in the gate area was completely dry; particularly so as the gate area is downstairs from the check in area.

Two examples of how bad the storm was:

• The Beijing-New York flight made an emergency landing at Sanya,


• The thunder made the glass in the windows shake.

Somewhat extraordinarily, in the8 hours waiting I saw no instances of airport rage. Really a very calm place, Sanya, even in the middle of an emergency.