Baoting is a highland county in Hainan's south-central hills, inhabited largely by Li and Miao communities and sitting at a cooler, damper elevation than the coastal resort towns. The landscape is emphatically tropical — dense forest, rushing streams, waterfalls — and the county has packaged much of this into two competing attraction zones that do respectable business drawing day-trippers from Sanya.
Yanoda Rainforest is the better of the two: a forty-minute hike up a forested valley past trees several hundred years old, with optional adrenaline additions like abseiling and zip-lines. The secondary forest has had time to recover and feels genuinely wild in stretches, even if the entrance plaza and shuttle buses do not. Betel Nut Valley (Binglanggu), the other major draw, is an ethnic cultural park built around a Li and Miao village, with demonstrations of traditional crafts, fire-walking, and the elaborate tattoo and weaving traditions of the Li women. It is more staged than the villages near Wuzhishan, but the displays are extensive and the setting among the hills is handsome — and the elderly Li women with traditional facial tattoos who can be met here are of a generation that will not be replaced.
The hot springs at Mount Qixian, in a national forest park at the county's western edge, are accessible by direct bus from Sanya and draw a largely Chinese wellness crowd. Soaking pools are set among bamboo and forest, and the water temperature is consistent enough to be genuinely therapeutic rather than just warm.