陵水 River in the early morning.

Some mornings I go out for a short walk with my son and he throws a few small stones off the bridge into the river, and then we go and buy some 酸奶, yoghurt, for him to drink before breakfast. Yesterday I took a couple of photographs ....

It was a beautiful morning here in Hainan, and I rested the camera on top of one of the stone uprights of the bridge. I took large sized images, thinking to crop pieces out of them, details that would load more quickly into a post. But then as I thought about writing, the opening of Finnegans Wake came to my mind:

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

It's not the place to unpack that here, but Joyce talks about the endless circling of water --- river to sea, sea to the clouds, which rain, rain, rain. But these pictures were taken looking back up the river, towards the source.

A lot of the trees here are rubber trees. When rubber cultivation started here in the 50s, so as not to be dependent on the British in Malaysia, it was a considerable achievement, pushing the boundaries of possibilies further north. Rubber trees are tropical and ever-green. Hainan is sub-tropical, and so the rubber trees here lose there leaves, but not in the autumn, in the spring. The first time I witnessed this it was very surprising: the relative cool of the winter, and the damp, ends, it warms up, and then all the leaves fall off the rubber trees. Very strange.

And then into the last picture, using the optical zoom, and when I looked at it this morning I saw these motorbikes, and what is surely a petrol driven water pump. For a patch of vegetables? There's plenty of water in this river.

I've used the #travel tag with this post, because yesterday we bought tickets to fly to Morocco. We have a friend there, and also Chinese citizens can enter the country without visas (and stay for three months). So in these last few days in China, I will look on myself as a traveller, and try to capture some memories to share.

Thank you for reading.