A Trip To Paradise

A few weekends ago ( I know I have been bad at keeping this thing up to date!) I went to Kenting. Kenting is on the southern point of Taiwan and is the major tourist attraction here. It possesses a wonderful beach, many resorts and a strip that has restaurants, night clubs, arcades (this is Asia after all) and many random shops on the street. The weird thing is that when you hear tourist, you almost automatically think white people. When you are in Mexico and hear of a tourist spot, it usually means that it is the spot where the gringos hang out, and it is the same for many other places. However, in this tourist Mecca of Taiwan, Gabe and I were the only white people there.

Kenting is about 100km away from the city I am living in. 100km is nothing by Canadian standards, but for the Taiwanese, 100km is a formidable distance. When you consider the entire island is only 500km long, this short journey for a north American is seemingly endless one for the Taiwanese. Nonetheless, I decided to make the journey.

When I decided to go to Kenting I was originally going to go alone, however, another English teacher from Wisconson decided to join me. His name is Gabe. He had lived in Japan for two years with his Girlfriend – they went together. Then when they returned to rural Wisconson, he just couldn’t stand it – so he decided to come here. His girlfriend didn’t….so we were both in Taiwan alone and both had girlfriends back home. It turns out we had much more in common and have since become good friends.

We decided to take our scooters to Kenting. We both had 50cc scooters, as I have mentioned in a previous blog, but decided to drive there anyway. Many people told us this was a very bad idea. Both the locals and the foreigners here told us that a) your scooters will probably blow up or b) if they don’t blow up, it will take you forever to get there. Gabe and I, being the crazy adventurers that we are, opted to take our scooters anyway. We reseaned that within the city our scooters could comfortably reach 50km/hr. Given that it was a 100km journey – we could make it there in 2 hours driving time. Factor in periodic stops so that our scooters would not blow up, and we figure about 3 hours drive would get us to our destination. I thought to myself, I could, in the same amount of time get to paradise as it would take me to drive to Calgary…..it was a no brainer.

Well, as usually calculations aren’t always accurate. It took us closer to 4.4 hours to get there, however, we got totally lost leaving the city. Our drive home would prove our time calculations correct.

The drive there was exciting, despite that fact that my rear end was starting to get sore! As we left the core of Kaohsiung, we began to see the industrial sector. Just like a science fiction movie, there was an entirely different city connected to ours. Instead of delapitaded buildings mixed with new ones, it had old, run down manufacturing plants fused with the new and the modern plant. “Made in Taiwan,” this is where it all came from. We also saw some agriculture, which is basically really small little plots of land spread throughout factories and buildings. It was a very fin drive!

Once we arrived we checked into the Catholic Youth Hostel. It was very cheap - $350 NT, which is about $11 Canadian. The room is nice, but I would later find an ant infestation that haunted me in the night. By haunted me, I mean they would all climb on my bed and try to strike up a friendship. I subsequently killed them, but they just kept coming back for more – perhaps they didn’t get the memo – “huge white guy does not want to cuddle.”

After we got settled in we went to the beach. You will have to see pictures. Nice white sand, hammocks and bamboo umbrellas. It was really paradise. We stayed on the beach for the better part of the day.
After the beach we went for lunch. There was a restaurant offering a meal and free internet access for $90 NT. We couldn’t refuse. The meal was basically microwavable fish sticks and rice, but it was a good internet connection!

After dinner we walked around, checked out the street stalls then proceeded to 7-11 to buy a beverage. We then took those beverages to the beach and had a romantic moon lit beach date where both Gabe and I evoked our feelings of how much better this moment would be if we were with our girlfriends and not with each other. Neither of took offense to the others feelings!

I went to bed, had my run in with the ants. Then we woke up early and headed to the southern most tip of Taiwan. It was a beautiful. I officially stood on a the pointy ocean rock that was as far as I could go in Taiwan without going swimming and having the waves violently push me into said pointy rock!

After that we drove through the mountains. We went to a look out point where you could see both sides of the island – both the Taiwan straight and the Pacific Ocean. I kept on pointing towards the pacific and saying “this way to Canada” – Gabe told me to stop as apparently is wasn’t as funny as I thought.

We went back to the beach and I slept on a hammock on the beach – the sun kissed my face while the ocean breezed gently rocked me about in my hammock. It was heaven.

We drove home and made it a much faster trip – although we did get lost coming back into the city. Overall, it was awesome and one of the highlights of my trip to date!