So here we are, sitting under palm fronds and Chinese lanterns, listening to the surf of the South China Sea break on a sugar-white beach. We're eating Russian borscht, drinking Malaysian beer and trying to get our morose, blond waiter to smile -- or at least pronounce the Cyrillic letters on his name tag.

"Muck-zeem," he finally growls in response to our clumsy hand gestures, and we get it: Maxim. He walks away rolling his eyes, a study in Slavic disdain.

Travelling in Asia, one experiences a lot of "where-the-hell-are-we" moments, occasions when the glamour, the kitsch or the squalor (more often, all three) overwhelm the senses. Nowhere is this giddy surreality more palpable than at Dadong Hai, the long, gorgeous horseshoe beach in Sanya at the southern tip of China's Hainan Island.

The Chinese call Hainan "the Hawaii of China," because the island, China's southernmost territory (not counting a handful of much smaller islands whose sovereignty is disputed by Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines and Brunei), is at a latitude roughly parallel to Hawaii. And because the island offers, in Sanya, the country's only tropical beach resort.

If it strikes you that "China" and "beach resort" shouldn't be in the same sentence, take it as fair warning. Incongruities abound in Sanya.

More than 18 million tourists flock to Hainan Island every year, yet it is all but unknown outside China, and Sanya's beautiful beaches are practically empty all day long.

Unlike every other beach resort in Asia -- from Thailand's Phuket to Bali's Khuta and the Philippines' Borokay -- almost no one in Sanya speaks English. But everyone, from the desk clerks to the beach touts, speaks some Russian to anybody who is not obviously Chinese.

You'll look long and hard to find a decent hamburger in Dadong Hai, but if you have to stroll more than 100 metres for a good blintz, you're not paying attention.

Outside China, Sanya is perhaps best known as the site of a not-no-secret nuclear submarine base, whose construction made headlines in 2008. But for the Chinese, it is a seaside resort that is warm in the winter yet doesn't require all those tedious exit permits and entry visas that are the bane of would-be tourists in mainland China.

For western ex-pats based in southern Chinese cities such as Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macau, Sanya is the perfect weekend getaway, barely an hour away by air, but boasting beaches as good as you'll find anywhere in Southeast Asia.

Its attraction to the Russians who make up the bulk of Sanya's foreign tourist trade is not as obvious. Sanya is neither nearby (most Russians have to fly six or more hours to get here), nor politically convenient (all foreigners, including Russians, need visas to visit China).

Chalk up the phenomenon to some savvy entrepreneurship back in the late '90s when Sanya was just beginning to be developed as a tourist destination. Sergey Zhang Sha, the Russian-born son of a Chinese circus performer who visited Hainan soon after it was made a province in 1988, brought his first Russian tourist to Sanya in 1997.

Since Russians were the first foreign tourists, services developed that catered particularly to Russians. This attracted even more Russians. Now most of the service-related signage in Dadong Hai is in Russian as well as Chinese.

The Russian tourists are about the only people you'll find among the phalanx of beach lounges during the day (other than the strolling peddlers and the beachside masseuses). The Chinese share a national trait that makes a beach holiday counter-intuitive: they hate the sun, avoid it as if it were emitting some deadly radiation from outer space. (Oh, wait a minute ... )

The most prevalent product on cosmetic shelves in China is whitening cream, so sunbathing is about as popular a seaside activity as impaling yourself on a beach umbrella. As a result, Sanya's beaches are all but empty until the sun starts to throw long shadows about 5:30 in the evening. Then the shore is crowded with merrymaking Chinese, who will continue to frolic in the surf until long after dark, 10 p.m. at least.

We stayed at the Pearl River Garden Hotel right above the boardwalk on Dadong Hai.

- Ottawa Citizen