This time we made it to the ferry terminal with ease (thank goodness!), however we hadn't anticipated such ease and suddenly found ourselves with an extra 5 hours on our hands. We managed to fill a few hours of these by sitting in a restaurant (and eating, of course) and the last few hours reading and people watching. It was quite funny to see the ferry employees stress about how to deal with these 2 foreigners - it soon became obvious that not many laowai catch the Haikou-Beihai ferry. Even though it was just a matter of waiting for the Beihai boat to be called and then following the masses, we were under strict instructions to "wait right here, we come get you"!!
Sure enough we were almost chaperoned onto the boat where we spent the night in our four-bunk bedroom, though no-one else joined us and we had the room to ourselves. The departure time of 6pm came and went in a flurry of inactivity as a swarm of yellow hard-hatted workers went about doing not much for a very long time. We ended up leaving the port at about 7.30pm, and headed out into the pitch black ocean, for a pretty good overnight journey to Beihai! Our only concerns were if the boat happened to come into trouble and the hundreds of passengers had to survive in 2 small lifeboats that looked like their lives began around the 1940s. Luckily we had stunning life jackets in our room, just in case!!
Adlibing the ocean.
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