Rice paddies

Left Haikou through the most amazing traffic jam of people going back to school, work, you name it. After a few more roadside solanum collections, we entered the central part of the island. It is essentially a huge garden – mostly cultivated in neat squares. Here the rice has been planted in paddies – it is the most luminescent green, and every field has a person in it weeding, planting or just generally tending to things.

Horsemen

In the little roadside face where we ate lunch a poster of Mao, Zhou and Liu and their Marshals was on the wall – it reminded me of the horsemen of the apocalypse! On the facing wall was one of the generals similarly astride horse with flowing manes all rushing headlong to somewhere.

Limushan

Our destination for today was Limushan Nature Reserve in the mountainous part of Hainan; here the peaks are up to 1400 metres above sea level and although they look completely clothed with forest, they were heavily logged all the way to the tops in the early part of the 20th century. Now, however, the area is a provincial reserve and the loggers have new jobs as park rangers. The forest is interesting, with an understory of bamboo and rattans and some very big trees of Podocarpus (a timber tree) and others. Given time, it will probably recover, especially if the protection continues. Rubber is planted right up to the edge of the Reserve, and Caribbean pines – so the edge is at risk.

Firecracker tree

The forest was incredibly dry – it is dry season and it has been a very dry year, so it was a bit disappointing on the solanum front, but we did see some rather lovely other plants, like the firecracker tree – a tree first described from Hainan (Rademachera hainanensis) in the Bignoniaceae, or catalpa family).