Deflated but not defeated

Deflated but not defeated
Kaohsiung, Taiwan

Kaohsiung, Taiwan

Our arrival in Kaohsiung should have probably been an indication of what we had to come, we bumbled out of the train station, headed to the taxi queue walked to the next empty taxi in line only to have the driver wave us off and point down the road. It seemed that this driver didn’t even care where we were going or whether we had the address ready and waiting written in Chinese, he didn’t want to take the foreigners anywhere. After lots of talking and waving and confusion of everyone in the taxi queue the driver eventually took us and safely delivered us to our hostel.

Our room at the hostel was small to say the least, with the bed and our two bags we didn’t really have room to walk around and had to slide across the bed to get anywhere, what was annoying was that the two other rooms on our floor had their doors open and we could see they were twice the size and even had windows. Do you ever get the feeling that a town is conspiring against you. After one very noisy night with a screaming baby and some extremely loud guests who decided to stand and chat outside our room at 3am we were thankfully ‘upgraded’ to one of the bigger and brighter rooms, phew.

Kaohsiung is the second most populous city in Taiwan and as we had discovered by now as soon as you leave Taipei if you can’t speak Chinese as a tourist you are buggered. Organised tours are in Chinese, signs, maps and guides are in Chinese and getting anywhere or doing anything is going to be hard. Never the type to shy away from a challenge we consulted what maps and guides were available made our usual to-do list.

Tim’s useful planning sessions in Thailand once again came into their own when we realised that the main reason we had come to Kaoshsiung was to visit Wushanding, the location of one of the only mud volcanoes in the world. However Tim’s expert planning and highlighting seemed to miss the very important detail of how you get there. It turns out that the only way to get there is to hire a car and drive, so it turns out that we are going to be missing the main reason we came to this town.

Hey ho, all is not lost, there are plenty of other things to see and do.

All in all we had three days on Kaohsiung and I think despite our best efforts we saw and did less than we have in any other city ever. Our first day we managed to get on a hop on hop off bus which took us around the city, we saw the old Banana Pier and had a rather tasty banana ice lolly, visited the Pier 2 Art area and watched the locals flying their kites in the park. On our way home, we made a short diversion to Formosa Boulevard metro station, the interchange station for the 2 metro lines. This station has a very impressive stain glass window roof. The Dome of Light has some pretty cool factoids: aside from looking really pretty, it is the world’s largest glass artwork, took 4 and a half years to complete and is made up of 4,500 pieces of glass. Apparently it is one of the top 15 most beautiful metro stations in the world.

We had every intention of doing more but with the sun blazing, the humidity rising and a general air temperature of 40 degrees plus we decided to beat a hasty retreat to our hostel to seek respite in the air conditioning.

The next day still dreading the heat and sun we planned to go to the Lotus Pond, a huge lake in the middle of the city surrounded by temples and with the beautiful Dragon and Tiger Temple in the middle. We did our research, got the metro to the bus stop and waited for the bus. It turns out that Mondays in Kaohsiung are definitely a day of rest as after standing at the bus stop for a full hour not a single bus appeared. So plan B, was to head to Kaohsiung Hongmaogang Cultural Park which overlooks the main Shipping harbour in Taiwan to watch the cargo ships come and go. First we got the metro half way across the city until we discovered that we are meant to go there by boat. So we hopped off the metro, about turned and headed back to our hostel. All in all we spent a good 3 hours on metro’s and stood at Bus stations and got absolutely nowhere. So we decided to treat ourselves to a bubble tea and call it quits. What is this Bubble Tea I hear you all asking, well Bubble Tea was invented in Taiwan in 1980’s. The tea vendors were ever looking for ways to make their tea stand out from the crowds and so the genius idea of putting Tapioca bubbles emerged. Now a common sight in the UK, this Taiwanese speciality takes some getting used to as you are given an extra large straw and need to get used to the chunks of tapioca shooting up the straw at the same time as a nice slurp of milk tea. It turns out that bubble tea is not so named because of the bubbles of tapioca as you might think, but because of the bubbles on the top of the drink because it is meant to be served well shaken. So there you go, a short history in bubble tea, I bet you will all sleep better with that knowledge.

One last day in Kaohsiung and we were determined to see something else, our friends Laura and Hadley who we had met travelling in Cambodia had lived here teaching for 2 years and so had provided us with all sorts of useful advice so we had to make the decision to try and see what we missed yesterday or try something new and head to the Fogwangshan temple which looked beautiful. We decided to retry our luck at the Lotus Pond.

So we got back on the metro, headed to the bus stop, waited for the 1pm bus and as our watches hit 1:15pm we quickly decided that a taxi was the only option, despite only being a 20 minute walk in 40 degree blazing sun it was not a wise move.

We finally made it to Lotus Pond and the Dragon and Tiger Temples and they were totally worth the effort. 2 seven story pagodas shooting out of the lake with a huge dragon that you enter through and a tiger that you exit from, it is bad luck to do it the other way, plus there is a man sat at the entrance to the dragon collecting the ‘voluntary’ contributions to enter. Climbing the dragon tower was stunning, not only because of the views across the lake and over the city but because of the amazing cool breeze which momentarily made us not want to rip off our skin and cry.

We had a bit of a walk around the lake looking at the other temples and after visiting the Taoist temple and getting a lucky golden egg out of the disco chicken arcade blessing game we couldn’t take it anymore and hailed a taxi back to the metro.

We had one last chance to get to Hongmaogang Cultural Park so we headed to Pier 2, followed the maps, followed the signs and ended up stood on an empty pier with a complete lack of any ticket booking office. This was clearly not to be, either we have lost our touch at this travelling malarkey or Kaohsiung just didn’t want us to explore. Either way it was time to call it quits and admit defeat.

On our way back to the hostel we did get to experience one of the oddities of Taiwanese life. You know at home when you hear that cheerful music playing on a hot summers day and you grab your purse and go running for the ice cream van…. Well in Taiwan you are going to be bitterly disappointed if you do this. The cheerful music emanating through the streets is actually the bin truck and rather than just leaving your bins out on the street on the requisite days, when you hear the music it is time to grab your bags of rubbish and chase after the bin truck. This was something of an odd sight, a bit like a zombie train of people all with their rubbish in hands mesmerized by the bin trucks perky melody.

I can only apologies that this blog is a bit pants, but it sadly reflects the time we had in Kaohsiung, here is hoping that Sun Moon Lake is going to be a bit less arduous for us useless non Chinese speaking travellers.

Next stop Sun Moon Lake.