On a tropical island wonderland, tourists on be
Tropical Hainan Province has long been a popular tourist destination for its sandy beaches, turquoise seas and palm trees. While most visitors flock to the southernmost city of Sanya, a vlogger who calls himself Kangyowei will tell you that his favorite spot on the island is Wenchang, where space launches can be viewed.
Before the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center went into operation in 2016, 2,000-year-old Wenchang was perhaps best known for its chicken, a breed considered one of the most delicious in the country.
Nowadays, people gather in the small city before designated launch dates. When the Long March 5B rocket was due to be launched from Wenchang on April 24, Kangyowei arrived in the island’s northeastern city five days earlier.
“I wanted to find the best place to watch the launch,” he said in a video recording the trip.
Viewing places abound — beaches, coastal parks and even balconies of some hotels. Originally the space center itself was partially open to the public, but it’s now off limits because of the coronavirus epidemic.
During his stay there, the vlogger recorded the mundane side of the city. It was early summer. People wearing shorts lay in hammocks hung between trees. Coconuts were piled up at fruit stands, with people sipping the milk through straws. Beaches were crowded despite the lingering threat of coronavirus.
Wenchang is a lot less commercialized than Sanya, giving visitors more of a chance to see real island life.
Just like Kangyowei, most of the visitors there were excited about the pending rocket launch of an experimental spacecraft that could be used to send astronauts to the moon in the future. Locals remained less sanguine; they are used to such activities.
Children showed more interest in Kangyowei’s camera than any rocket launch. Some locals wondered why outsiders would travel to the almost southernmost point of China just to watch a steel object soar into the sky.
“What is it like when a rocket lifts?” he asked the children.
“Just a string of boom, boom, booms!”
But on April 24, the weather refused to cooperate. Dark, thick clouds enveloped the sky and raindrops began to hit the ground. There was no official update on the launch.
“I was very nervous, like many others,” Kangyowei said in the video. “After all, we failed twice on spacecraft launches recently.”
The two failures he referred to occurred on March 16 and April 9 — one in Wenchang and the other in Sichuan Province’s Xichang. On March 16, two hours after a Long March-7A rocket lifted off from the Wenchang center, officials announced that the satellite it was carrying failed to enter geosynchronous transfer orbit.
As expected, the April 24 launch was postponed. Kangyowei left Wenchang with regret but vowed to return when the launch was rescheduled.
Fast forward to May 5. The sky was crystal blue and the sea tranquil in Wenchang. Kangyowei was back with a group of friends. So were other people carrying their best photographic equipment, from digital single-lens reflex cameras with longfocus lenses to the latest models of smartphones. They were there to witness what might be a once-in-alifetime moment for them.
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