We wanted to set off early the next morning to make a detour to the Yehliu Geopark. Unfortunately, none of the buses that had been announced came. After almost 2 hours of waiting, we decided to drive back to Ruifang first. Some locals helped us there and so we finally caught a bus to our interim destination.
There wasn’t actually that much to see in the Yehliu Geopark – just a few rocks. However, some of these stones had naturally created shapes that were reminiscent of animals or well-known people, such as the famous “Queens Head”. So we wandered through the park, marveled at the stones and took a short break with an ice-cold, delicious mango smoothie.
We then took the bus to Taipei and from there the express train to Taichung. Unfortunately, we chose the wrong station for our exit and so it took a while to get to our hotel and it was already getting dark. As we were unlucky with buses again, we took an Uber to get to a city park where there were supposed to be a few statues and works of art – after a long, mile-long search on foot, we found at least a few statues. However, on our way to the night market – we were very hungry – we found a small alley with countless cartoons on the walls. We ended the evening at the Zhongxiao Road Night Market with various delicacies: Skewers of heart, lung, liver, fish and unknown things; cold tea, juices and some beers.
31.05.2023:
Our day started at the hotel with cold rice, noodles and various vegetables. While Andreas liked it, this breakfast was not Mel’s cup of tea. Freshly fortified, we set off in search of a bus to take us to the sun-moon lake about 2 hours away.
After a bit of hustle and bustle at the bike rental shop – there was no one to be seen for a while – we sat on our bikes after a while and rode around the lake for a while, marveling at the peace and quiet and nature. After we had returned the bikes, we first found out why there was such a slightly tense atmosphere everywhere today. Typhoon Mawar was heading straight for Taiwan after having swept over Guam a few days earlier with wind speeds of over 230km/h.
Once again, it was a little difficult for us to find a bus to get back, so our bike rental company simply took us back to the next town in his car. This gave us the opportunity to get to know each other better. Before Corona, he worked in the telecommunications industry and traveled a lot around the world. Among other things, he knew Hanover and CeBIT quite well, as he had been there every year. When asked to what extent he or other Taiwanese were afraid of China and the tense situation, he simply waved his hand and said: “We are not afraid. I myself was with our very good military and if we were to be attacked, we would defend ourselves.”
The bus to Taichung took about 1 hour, from there we took a superfast train to Kaohsiung in about 45 minutes and then took the bus to Kenting (about 2.5 hours). There we moved into our hostel room with its own roof terrace, bought some more delicacies at the night market (dumplings, garlic chicken, fried vanilla ice cream, melon juice, grilled octopus, tea, cocktail for €10), gambled away another €10 at the vending machines and then drank four more beers on our roof terrace while we watched the lightning and the dark rumbling of the approaching typhoon in the distance.
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