Every surf trip has a rest day, and on most of them it is a wasted one. Not here. Wanning sits on the east coast of Hainan, a tropical island with about 1,800 km of coastline, a mountainous green interior and a culture that predates the rest of China’s, and most of it is within a 30–90 minute drive of the PerfectSwell® wave pool at Riyue Bay. You can surf a morning session, swim under a waterfall by lunch and be back at the resort for sunset. This is the rest-day guide: what there is to do in Wanning and the surrounding coast, how far it is from the pool, and how we fit it around your sessions.
1. Swim under a rainforest waterfall
Hainan is not the China most people picture. Inland from the surf, the island rises into palm-covered mountains, with protected rainforest around Yinggeling and Wuzhishan, the island’s highest peak at 1,867 m. The forests hide waterfalls that most visitors to China never hear about, and on a hot day there is nothing better than a hike through the trees, a canopy walk or a suspension bridge, then cold fresh water at the bottom. We run it as a morning outing or a guided half day, so it slots in before or after a pool session. The full picture of what the island’s interior looks like is on our nature and adventure page.
2. Drive the mountain roads to the Li villages
Before the resorts, before the surf pool, before the name “China” reached these shores, the Li were here. They are Hainan’s indigenous people, around 1.5 million of them today, with more than 3,000 years on the island and a language that has no written form, so their history lives in what they make. The villages sit in the mountains and valleys just inland from the surf, best reached near Wuzhishan and Baoting, and the drive there is half the point: inland roads winding through palm-covered ridges and rice paddies under banyan trees. Stop for fruit, stay for the view.
Li brocade weaving
Watch a master weaver work a backstrap loom. Li brocade is a UNESCO-recognised craft, its patterns passed from mother to daughter for a thousand years, and every pattern is coded: a wedding blanket tells you where a woman is from, who her mother was and which mountain her village belongs to.
Ancient villages, and fire and song at night
Walk through stilted wooden houses and boat-shaped roofs in a restored Li settlement, architecture built for monsoons long before concrete reached the island. Then, if you want the full day, finish with a sit-down dinner and a live performance: bamboo-pole dancing, fire shows and Li folk songs. Part feast, part concert, part history lesson. We build it in at the depth you want, from a half-day village visit to a full cultural day; details are on the culture page.
3. Walk a coffee plantation in Xinglong
Hainan is the only province in China that can grow real tropical crops at scale: coffee, cacao, pepper, mango, coconut, lychee. Most of it never leaves the island. Xinglong, a small town a short drive inland from Wanning, was settled in the 1950s by overseas Chinese returning from Southeast Asia, and they brought coffee plants, cacao and Nanyang-style cooking with them. It is why Hainan has a coffee culture older than most of China’s, decades before the first café opened in Beijing. On a plantation visit you walk the rows, pick a cherry and see it roasted; a small chocolate maker nearby runs a two-hour bean-to-bar workshop, pod to paste to tempered bar. For the plantations, the cafés and what to order, read our Xinglong coffee and Wanning food guide.
4. Eat your way through the morning market
Go early and go with a local. Fishermen unload the night’s catch, tropical fruit you have never seen is stacked in pyramids, and pepper and chili are piled a foot deep. Leave with breakfast. Then, at lunch, eat the dishes that only make sense when the ingredient grew a few miles away that morning: Wenchang chicken, coconut hotpot and lobster noodles, at the places locals actually eat rather than the ones on the resort strip. The lobster on your plate was probably alive that morning. Our food and coffee page covers the four ways to eat Hainan; a market walk pairs naturally with an afternoon in Xinglong.
5. Play the best links course in China
About 30 minutes from the pool, on the Shenzhou Peninsula, The Dunes at Shenzhou Peninsula is widely rated the best links course in China and one of Asia’s finest seaside layouts. An hour and a half further up the island, Blackstone at Mission Hills Haikou is a former world top-100 course built across black lava fields and played by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy. For a surf-and-golf week the golf takes the mornings the pool doesn’t; our 6-day surf and golf itinerary shows how the two fit together, and the course guide to The Dunes walks the layout hole by hole.
6. Paddle, snorkel or sail the coast
The coastline south and north of Riyue Bay still goes empty between headlands. Glass-clear bays for snorkeling and paddleboarding, a quiet paddle through mangrove-lined rivers just inland, or a private yacht charter for a day offshore. When the surfer is in the pool, this is where the rest of the group goes, and when the swell is running, Riyue Bay itself has real ocean surf, the home break of Chinese surfing, on the beach side of the same grounds as the pool.
7. The duty-free day
Hainan is a duty-free island, home to the biggest duty-free mall in the world. It is not in Wanning, and it is not why anyone books a surf trip, but for the non-surfer in the group, or the last day before the flight home, it is the reason Hainan is the most unique surf and golf trip going: a tropical wave pool, links golf and tax-free luxury shopping on one island.
How a rest day actually fits
We plan the surf sessions and tee times first, then fill the gaps. The resort is a good base for it: the hotel sits inside the surf-park grounds, so a car can collect you from the deck after a morning session and have you at a waterfall or a coffee plantation before lunch. Nobody has to sit still, and nobody has to choose between the pool and the island.
Wanning rest days at a glance
Getting to Wanning is the easy part
Hainan offers 30-day visa-free entry for passport holders from the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Canada and many other countries. Fly direct from Sydney or Melbourne to Haikou (HAK), or connect through Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur or Seoul into Haikou or Sanya (SYX). The getting here guide covers airports and transfers to Riyue Bay, and the trip planner puts the whole first trip in order.
Ready to plan the days around the surf?
Tell us your dates, your group and how deep you want to go — a single morning outing or a full cultural day — and we’ll build it around your sessions. Browse the trip packages, keep reading the journal, or get in touch: hello@surfchina.co or WhatsApp +8613893402173.
