kaohsiung
I had never heard of Kaohsiung until I went looking for a quick getaway destination, at just over 1 hour from Hong Kong and with flights at the right time of day it made the shortlist for our Chinese New Year 3 day break. I did a brief Google and found a blog post where it sounded like a good place to visit so we locked it in. It positively surprised us for sure, I can highly recommend it and am now keen to check out more of Taiwan.
We spent the first day wandering around at Pier 2 Art District, a huge area by the harbour that used to be port warehouses and has now been taken over by art installations, small shops, food carts, bars and restaurants. There are train tracks running through the middle of it all which are grassed but still in use. Then at one end is all the unused parts of the old port railway, with trains still standing and huge scuptures interespersed. It was full of families when we were there and most of the kids were either flying kites or blowing giant bubbles.
We ate lots of good food at the market, enjoyed discovering all the bits and pieces of art and soaking up the heat. We even jumped in a super cool VR thing where we evolved from cells to robots in 8 minutes, my first proper VR session and won’t be the last, was really trippy and a lot of fun.
For the evening we headed to a monastery where they had a big event on for Chinese New Year, when we got there the light show was just kicking off but the amount of people trying to watch it was completely insane. We decided to abandon ship and just chill out and eat some dinner. We then headed to check out the rest of the monastery, just as everyone rushed to the giant buddha for the fireworks so had a quieter moment to wander around. The grounds are absolutely massive and there were markets, fire dancers, drummers and lots of interesting (pokemon!) lit up statues all around. We headed up to the main buildings for a birds eye view, then whilst peeping our heads into one of the rooms a lovely monk started chatting to us. She talked us through their orchid ceremony so we could make a wish, then told us about the calligraphy on the walls, asked us about our religion and then whipped her smartphone out of her robes to show us the address of the Hong Kong branch of their monestary. She took us to make a wish on a red and gold paper then took us on a tour of the rest of the building, it was actually super interesting talking to her and hearing about the monastery and the founder. By this time the crowds had cleared and we headed towards the massive gold buddha, and the attached buddha museum including a random collection of traditional chinese dresses and bridal wear (?!).
Getting home was a great adventure, the queue for buses back to the city were insane, like you couldn’t even see the end and we had no idea whether everyone in the queue would even get a seat so we abandoned that plan pretty quick. After a fair bit of mucking around we managed to get a taxi, and with the help of some high tech voice chat via google translate, we established that our driver wanted to full the whole car before he headed to the city. We managed to find some people eventually but I swear the first two groups of people he asked didn’t get in because of us. We were the only non-asian looking people we saw the whole evening so I think they were all very confused by us! All in all a random but cool evening.
Day 2 in Kaohsiung was biking and hiking, we were going to head to Cijin Island and bike around there but a huge queue put us off. We noticed that motorbikes were skipping the queue so headed off on a mission to find one! We ended up with normal bikes, but by that time were down at a nice, sunny, quiet part of the water front and decided to mission around there instead, watching fisherman, appreciating the island from across the water and generally enjoying the freedom of bikes. After lunch at a very hipster vegetarian joint we headed for Monkey Mountain for a hike. At our first fork in the path we stood looking confused for 30 seconds and a lovely local women offered to show us the way. As we had no plan for which trail we wanted to walk we took up her offer and paced behind her up the hill. The final stop ended up being a lookout where they serve free barley tea for hikers, the locals bring up the water for the tea in huge containers on their backs. We enjoyed a tea, then said goodbye to our guide as she headed down and we took a final climb to max out the views. It was a nice hike and cool to see lots of monkeys along the way, they are very unafraid of humans so much so that there were signs telling you what to do if a monkey jumps on your head (don’t scream and just walk calmly on… yea right!). Our afternoon mission was completed with the yummiest hugest shaved ice with mango ice cream, fresh mango and mango syrup, someone needs to get onto this shaved ice buzz in NZ, so good.
After returning our bikes we headed out to a night market for dinner, the food was awesome, we had cubes of beef, fried grated potatoe with random green powder and thousand island dressing, random fried octopus ball thingy, and more delicous filled waffles. As well as the food there were your usual market type stalls which we ignored and headed for the games! These were extremely popular and included things like archery, throwing darts at baloons, pinball, bottle fishing, throwing small loops on bottles and standard darts. The prizes were basically all soft toys of varying sizes. After failing to land any loops on bottles and struggling with the bottle fishing a win was needed… an almost perfect round of darts was played and a young girl was the extremely stoked recipient of the prize - an awesome unicorn! Such a sweet way to end the night.
Our final day was spent in Kenting National Park, we went high roller and hired a driver for the day, without an international licence we couldn’t hire a car and we figured this would be the most efficient way. It was awesome. Our driver Charlie was amazing, he had bought along a local egg pastry for us to have for breakfast, told us lots of interesting facts and he made sure to add in a stop at a famous steamed bun shop for lunch. We headed to the “recreation area” of the park first which has various gardens, old gnarly trees, stalactite caves, view points and some interesting “coral forests”. After a couple of hours there we headed for the beach, which was the main reason for visiting the national park. I had randomly picked a beach off a map for us to go to, but Charlie had other ideas so we went with his suggestion and ended up at a stunning beach for the afternoon. It seemed the locals preferred not to walk or something … so the start of the beach was crammed with people and just 2 minutes walk down the beach was clear and chilled. Swimming, reading, napping, sunshine, we loved it.