Week 7

On Monday we got up nice and early and scouted a few more villages around the base of Wuzhishan. We then headed back home to chill out after our long weekend of work. In the evening we headed to “Pirates!” restaurant for dinner – yummy ; )

On Tuesday we spent the morning cleaning up the house (fun). I then headed to the dreaded market to do some weekly shopping. I have very mixed feelings with respect to this place. Bustling with activity and a multitude of fascinating products the market is always interesting to visit, yet on each venture there I am confronted with sites that annoy or disgust me. The first time I visited I was shocked (but not surprised) by the dried seahorses and shark fins and the second time I spied the grouper and the juvenile sharks. This time I was saddened to see a fresh shipment of marine life turn up, unlike fish markets at home all of these animals are very much alive, stuffed into tanks until they can barely move. Buckets of fish were being loaded onto a three wheeler (a 125cc bike with side cart), amongst the animals were juvenile titan trigger fish Balistoides viridescens (little larger than my hand), moray eels (Family Muranidae), stonefish (Family Synanceiidae), boxfish (Family Ostracidae), mantis shrimps (Order Stomatopoda), batfish (Family Ephippidae) as well as many others. The Chinese are extremely willing to eat fish of any size, quality or flavour. This could pose a problem to the long term sustainability of their fish stocks. Typically western fisheries try and target a few fish species that have the best and most flavoursome flesh. The juvenile fish of some species are protected to a degree by measures such as minimum mesh sizes, fishing quotas, limits on fishing effort and marine protected areas. The fish at the market at Sanya have been afforded none of this protection. Many are juveniles and have never produced young. They never will. Such fishing is completely unsustainable and wreaks havoc upon marine ecosystems. Having made the comparison between asian and western fisheries I must add that very few western fisheries managers get things right…

The next day Will, Afa, Ed and myself headed to Jianfengling rainforest reserve to scout out a gorge trek. On arriving at the reserve entrance I was delighted to see Chinese sturgeon, Acipenser sinensis, lazily swimming circles in a large tank. These fantastic animals are long lived and can grow to massive sizes – the European sturgeon is capable of growing to 1000 kg (a rare event in today’s waters) and when caught in the medieval times had to be hauled from the water via plough horses! The fish is anadromous – i.e. eggs are laid in freshwater streams where the young grow and once at a certain size the juveniles head to the sea to rich feeding grounds to mature. Adults head back to their birth waters to spawn. Due to the large size of these fish they are easily hunted. These fish also require navigable, oxygen rich and free flowing rivers. Most of the rivers in China are damned multiple times and suffer from very poor quality. These factors combine to make the Chinese sturgeon (as well as the majority of sturgeon species) critically endangered. The information board stapled to the tank was highly suspect. It stated that the fish never needs to feed! Apparently its nutritional requirements are met by “magical energies”. Rounding the corner I found another info board, this one stating how fantastic the sturgeon flesh and caviar is! In all honesty I believe the centre is trying to enhance the sturgeon population, yet any fish released into the wild on Hainan would be fished from the water in hours due to the huge number nets, fishing lines and electrofishers. The fish would also most likely perish in the polluted and oxygen poor rivers of Hainan. I believe the Chinese sturgeon could well perish in my lifetime.

After watching the sturgeon we headed to the gorge. I was delighted to find it fairly remote and free of tourists. The river here was wide and flowed clear. Sadly I did spy a few pipes feeding the river with sewage, which I doubt had been treated in anyway. On closer inspection of the river bed I was rewarded by discovering a few sessile caddis (Trichoptera). These caddis, cemented to the river rock in their stony homes, face the current to filter organic particulate matter.

On the way down from the reserve our driver managed to destroy his brakes! He did this by coasting 10 km downhill relying only on the brakes to slow our descent. We decided to abandon the vehicle (to the drivers dismay) and find our own way home. The driver got angry and couldn’t understand why we didn’t wish to undertake the 3 hour journey home with him. We managed to find some sort of taxi van which gave us a lift to the main road. I had a look along the side of the road and found a mole cricket! I was pretty excited to find it as I’ve never seen one before. This insect has stout forelimbs and a blunt head modified for digging. Sadly I couldn’t take a picture as my camera batteries were dead. Afa managed to flag a huge lorry down and bartered a price home for us.

On Friday Neil, Laura and myself headed out on a kayak scouting mission from Luhuitou (where the Hainan Adventures base is) and headed East around the peninsula. After 30 minutes we happened across a small bay, the sandy beach was dotted with rocks which penetrated into the gentle surf. We snorkelled here for a while – I was saddened by the large amount of dead coral and coral rubble. The culprits of this were in evidence around the bay – tens of tour boats dumping their anchors onto the reef. Also negligent bathers were trampling all over with their Croc© shoes.

On Friday I got carried away with the coke and rum. Saturday was unproductive as a result!

On Sunday we all headed to Hou Hai to do a beach clean. The rubbish here is appalling. The strand line is heaped with plastics of all types, polystyrene, clothes, fishing line, glass bottles, empty cosmetics containers etc. We concentrated our efforts on a small section, heaping burnable rubbish into piles and separating recyclable materials. By the end of the day the difference was impressive. The fact is, however, that the beach will be littered in no time. The villagers nearby simply dump their rubbish onto the beach. Litter is also dumped indiscriminately by fisherman and owner of leisure craft. China has few tropical beaches within its territory. You would think this would make the Chinese government highly protective over such environments. Sadly on Hainan the only beaches that are looked after are those backed by 5 star resorts. Despite the litter at Hou Hai I decided to snorkel around the rocks to the left of the beach. I was glad to see numerous hermit crabs, oysters and swimmer crabs as well as a few small box fish.