"Wait, is that blood?" I ask my friend, A, a little concerned. The pavement is spattered with a wet, shiny, crimson-ish substance. Looking more closely, I see dried and drying splotches of red on the pavement and street all around me. It must have been one hell of a stabbing.
"It's betel-nut juice," he smiles, reassuringly.
Damn, why does he always have the answer to everything! Not only does he always know where we are and where we are going, thanks to his iPhone and Jeep Pee Arse, or whatever it's called, it seems he can somehow miraculously Google - in his mind - the answers to most of my questions, sometimes before I've asked them.
Then again, he probably looked up facts about Hainan province before we left Hong Kong, presumably seeing in the first sentence on Wikitravel: "Hainan guys chew betel nut. All the time. Everywhere. And they spit the juice everywhere, especially near foreigners' feet so that the latter go back to their hotel rooms and have to scrape rust-red spots off the hems of their trousers." Or something like that.
At first sight, I thought Haikou, the capital of Hainan and the last stop on the train we took from Guangzhou, look-ed pretty much like a biggish town in Guangdong province. The people and buildings look about the same; it is cold but in a bearable way; and the street scenes are the same chaos of open shop fronts and goods spilling out over the pavements. Then I noticed the "blood" thing, which, fortunately, comes from chewing and spitting out nuts and not from mass murder. (The shops here also have big mounds of coconuts outside them - you don't see that in Guangdong.)
Is it because the nut gives them "a mild euphoria" (according to Wikipedia) that the red-mouthed chewers seem even friendlier than other Chinese? Perhaps. But still - everywhere in Hainan are young handsome men whose mouths, when they smile, look like Victorian cemeteries at dusk; a few dark brown slabs standing around half-heartedly in sinister darkness, framed by a blood-red sunset. And at the station in Sanya I have to nudge A when I see a father feeding betel nuts to his son, who looks about a year old. Does he want the boy to lose his teeth before he even gets them?