Aliens have landed…

Aliens have landed…
Green Island , Taiwan

Green Island , Taiwan

When we had planned on visiting Taiwan, one place seemed to stand out as a must visit location, Green Island seemed to have it all. Snorkeling, diving, sea water hot springs and a rugged beauty that you just don’t find anymore, how could be possibly resist.

There was one problem with getting to Green Island. The only way in or out is by a small prop plane which only has 8 seats and is near on impossible to book if you are not Chinese or the boat which according to every blog and the Lonely Planet is dubbed the ‘Sea Sick Express’. We are not the worst travellers, we managed to endure 48 hours crossing from Shanghai to Osaka without too much trouble despite horrific conditions, but this boat just instilled the fear of god into us. We even watched a YouTube video someone had made on the boat which started with everyone laughing and joking and soon progressed to everyone including the videographer vomiting into the small see-through plastic bags distributed around the boat. To say that we were not looking forward to this trip would be an understatement.

It turns out that being sick on the boat wasn’t our biggest problem, getting a ticket on it was. We had tried to book in advance, but once again foreigners can’t reserve without a Taiwanese bank card so we just had to rely on dumb luck and turn up hoping for the best. After a nice smooth train journey we headed to the tourist information centre to be told that all the boats and planes were fully booked and we would have to head to the harbour and hope that we could get a cancellation. Oh Bugger.

So we hopped in a taxi and headed to the harbour, walked to the ticket booth and booked a ticket for the next boat with not a single hitch??!! Er, what happened to every boat being booked?!

However with a ticket in hand we now had to start worrying about this nightmare crossing that we were about to endure. Tim who has never been seasick in his life (except for once which could be more attributed to a hangover than the sea) was almost making himself sick with worry before we got on the boat.

We got on, secured our seat and braced for the worst journey of our lives, 50 minutes on the Sea Sick Express to Green Island. It turns out that whoever wrote the Lonely Planet and the blogs travelled in very different conditions to us and before we knew it the boat was docked and we were there. Really, all those weeks of worry for that?!

We had booked a little B&B on Green Island as it is notoriously busy with tourists and we had tried to contact our host to get picked up but got no response. Nevermind we thought, we can just get a taxi. Fail number 2 of the day. Green Island has no taxis and you are totally reliant on your accommodation to pick you up. Thanks for the heads up Agoda, way to go.

After sweating it out at the harbour we eventually managed to find a young girl who helped us call our host who just hung up on us when we spoke English.

It turns out that we had definitely picked the wrong accommodation. We should have taken more notice of all the terrible reviews saying how awful the host was, but we thought that we could win him over and make him pleasant. We were wrong. Grumpy Jon as we decided to call him spoke no English and even when we tried to communicate through the magnificent power of Google translate he just looked at us like we had three heads. Every accommodation on Green Island is meant to offer you a free snorkel tour and a night tour around the island, needless to say we got neither and were lucky that we managed to get Grumpy Jon to hire an electric moped for us.

Thankfully with a map and a moped we were able to explore the island on our own and what a beautiful little gem it was. Underdeveloped, rugged, clean and beautiful, everything we hoped, although it was so so so hot, doing anything was a struggle. We managed to get into a routine of touring in the morning, sleeping in the afternoon and exploring as the sun went down. The most annoying thing was that diving was extortionate and every time we went to snorkel the tide was on the turn and the pier to get over the reef was being battered by waves. Had our host taken us we would have been given wetsuits and booties which at least provide some protection from the lava rocks that you are going to have to clamber on, but with just our bare legs and feet we didn’t want to risk it. What was amazing was that the rock pools around the island were so clear and full of life that we managed to see a morey eel, a few wrasse and even an amazing little mantis shrimp without getting in the water.

Green Island is only 19km around the edge so it takes about 30 minutes to go all the way around, unless you are a foreigner and are only allowed to rent an electric scooter. In 2013 an 18 year old American tourist died after crashing her moped and so now foreigners are only allowed electric bikes. This seems odd as there are plenty of steep edges that you can drive off regardless of whether you are going at 30kmph or 50kmph. We quite liked our little electric scooter, we pootled around and after a loop of the island we plugged in our battery whilst all the local tourists queued at the one fuel pump on the island.

We managed to find a nice lady who ran a B&B and restaurant who let us join her husband’s night tour for free. Basically you set off on your mopeds playing follow the leader whilst the guide uses his search light to find the many creatures of the night lurking in the Green Island hedgerows. There were 2 problems with this tour, first off the guide spoke only Chinese, secondly everyone else on the tour had a real moped so we took up our position at the back of the procession on our little shop mobility scooter and generally by the time we caught up anything that they had stopped to see had long gone. Thankfully there was a sweet young Taiwanese girl on holiday with her family who kindly told us in English what we could have seen if we had got there quicker. We did get to see some cool stuff, huge stick insects, huge green beetle type bugs which are different on Green Island to anywhere else as they have evolved to no longer have wings as their main predators are birds so they just snuggle in plants instead. We saw lizards, frogs and the most amazing little Silka deer’s. We also got to see a super special animal which from a distance looked like some sort of big cat, however our sweet little girl who was translating didn’t know its name so just told us it was ‘super cute’. I have tried to look it up and it seems that it could have been a Leopard Cat, too cool! It is said that Green Island from the mainland looks like a giant UFO at night with all the scooters on night tours and the guides with their search lights circling the island.

Exploring the island we saw plenty of cool sights, the lighthouse, the sea water hot springs, sleeping beauty rock, the little great wall and of course some magnificent views out into the clear blue waters of the Pacific Ocean.

Green Island has not always been a beautiful holiday location; it was once the Taiwanese equivalent of Alcatraz housing the political prisoners during the martial law period of Taiwanese history under the Kuomintang (KMT, Chinese Nationalist Party) government led by Chiang Kai-shek.

After World War 2 under martial law there was an era now known as the “White Terror”, “White Terror” at its broadest meaning refers to the entire period of 1949 to 1987. Around 140,000 Taiwanese were imprisoned during this period, of which about from 3,000–4,000 were executed, for their real or perceived opposition to the Kuomintang . Most actual prosecutions, though, took place in 1950–1952. Most of those prosecuted were labelled by the Kuomintang as “bandit spies” meaning spies for Chinese communists, and punished as such.

The locals on Green Island were warned to keep away from the prisoners but they soon started to interact and the locals realised that they were not bad people, they
taught the locals how to grow peanuts, they provided education and health care and introduced shell painting and operas for the locals to enjoy. The prisoners became known as ‘New Lifers’ because they brought new life to Green Island.

This part of Taiwanese history is not well known and it was interesting to visit the prison grounds to get a better education of this dark piece of history. The prison grounds are mainly just deserted and broken down which just adds to the darkness of the whole place. Some parts have been converted into a museum so you can see how the prisoners lived and the main prison building seemed to be undergoing a renovation and had some art installations in some of the cells, a bit weird.

After our (or should I say Tim’s) rather hot experience at the hot springs in Taipei we had now learnt that going to them in the red hot midday sun was not a good idea so instead we headed there well after sunset to take in the night sky and enjoy the cool evening breeze. The Salt water springs are one of only three in the world. Arriving at the hot springs it seemed that every other tourist on Green Island had had the same idea, it was absolute chaos, we just hoped that the majority of the people were on tour groups and would be gone in 20 minutes. It turns out that mother nature was looking out for us and just as we secured a spot in a nice hot covered spring the heavens opened. Despite being sat in a pool of water everyone freaked out, ran for cover and left. 10 minutes later the rain had eased, the pools had emptied and we got to take our pick of which pool to visit. Once the tide receded they opened the more rugged pools in the shore line which were just blissful to sit in the warmth whilst listening to the waves crashing just feet away and with lightning illuminating the sky around us. After about 2 hours our shrivelled fingers could take no more so we called it a night and took our warm relaxed bodies back to the hard bed at Grumpy Jon’s house.

All too soon it was time to leave Green Island, we had had a great time being pretty much the only foreigners on the island for the last 3 days but it was time to move on. With the sea still calm and beautiful we braved the Sea Sick Express again without incident.

Back to the bright lights and the big city, Kaohsiung here we come.