This feature image may not look like much. You can see green trees, but what you don’t know, is that this is actually a photo of a massive volcanic caldera, right in Haikou!
The Haikou Volcanic Cluster Global Geopark (long name!) is a main tourist attraction in Haikou. It only takes about 30 minutes to get to the park from downtown, and it’s easily accessible via Didi or taxi.
There are about 40 volcanoes in this volcanic field, but don’t worry, none of them have erupted seriously in about 16,000 years. The area is a popular tourist attraction and a nice way to spend a couple of hours.
Thanks to past volcanic activity, the park itself is very lush and green. There are areas where the earth is almost alien, and made up of dried lava flow, ash and volcanic rocks.
There’s an educational element to the park as well. I really liked the info about how people lived in this region long ago. Volcanic soil is great for agriculture, and people learned how to live from the land.
A house traditional historical house 
Walls made of volcanic stone 
Tools for processing grains. As the populations grew in this area, they needed to innovate ways to make food. 
It’s a dry region, so rain water needed to be collected in stone basins.
There was plenty of info on volcanoes as well, with photos of volcanoes from all around the world.
Of course, the best part of our trip to the volcano park was seeing the big volcano itself. A lot of stairs are involved, but that’s almost always true in China, so we were prepared. Our walk around the top of the caldera was beautiful.
And you can even climb down to a cave inside as well. It was equally beautiful and wonderfully cool!
There was plenty to see in the park, including some very nice cactuses, wood carvings and places where you can worship the volcano gods. There were some unexpected wood carvings too. I’m still not sure how they were connected to this geo park…
If you’re in Haikou, a trip to the Volcano Park is a must!! Stay tuned for more about our Hainan Roadtrip!!