It’s an interesting question. Hainan has built its tourist economy on the three Fs – flying, flopping and families – and the three Rs – rest, relaxation and resorts. How could it cater for a single RNFP (restless non-family person) desperate to flee this lovely compound and explore?

First, they sent me to surf school.

We drove to Riyue Bay, also known as Sun and Moon Bay. Here was the surf club: concrete floor, exposed brick walls, beer bottles, old car seats, old wetsuits steaming in the sun and a resident population of tanned, bleached-hair, sunburnt, hardcore surfies. This was Hainan; and this was highly hipster. These are not words you see in the same sentence very often.

China has no surfing culture to speak of. What there is you’ll find on this beach. It has already hosted international competitions. The guys who run this place, evangelical about their sport, have been offering free lessons to the village kids. I’m a hopeless surfer, but just watching (and ducking) as pre-teens whizzed among the breakers like supercharged seals was energising enough. I met Ivy, a 25-year-old from Hunan with a marketing degree who fetched up here a year ago and is now one of the instructors. Before she arrived here she’d hardly been to a beach, let alone picked up a surfboard. Give surfing time.

The next day I was out on the water in a rather different style. Instead of the gritty, sandy floor of the surf club I found myself sliding on the polished marble floors of the Clearwater Bay marina. Pretty much everything here is marble apart from some directional mosaics and important art works.

But the mission of Alan Chan, the Singaporean founder of the marina, is not very different from the surfing guys’: get the (predominantly Chinese) visitors to Hainan off the beaches and into/onto the water.

Chan took us out on his luxury yacht. We pointed the prow towards Wuzhizhou Island with the Raffles beach on starboard and on the portside, nothing much. Chan let me take the wheel, and a slightly unnerving experience that was, as a million dollars worth of boat quivered underneath me.

Chan thinks yachting, the idea of being on the water for pleasure not because you’re a fisherman, just hasn’t taken root in Asia yet. And as we coasted back to harbour past the empty moorings and silent, immaculate apartment blocks I could see what he meant: in Auckland, the Riviera, Florida, even Hong Kong, this water would be thick with white hulls and tanned pleasure-seekers.

Give yachting time.