We arrived in Kaohsiung in the south of Taiwan after an overnight flight and got to our hotel at about 10am in the morning. Usually if a hotel has a room available they’ll let you check in early, especially when you’re obviously very tired and it’s clear all you’ll do is sit around in their lobby until they help you. Not this time, and as we discovered over the next couple of weeks, not anywhere in Taiwan. Bear this in mind when planning your transport between cities – you absolutely will not ever be able to check in early. And our Kaohsiung hotel check in was at 3 pm, so we had 5 hours to kill, and no pity from the receptionist of the very empty hotel.

Kaohsiung is a fun city with lots of art installations and interesting architecture along the waterfront. The streets felt eerily quiet after the noise of south-east Asian traffic, but it’s the second largest city in Taiwan and fairly busy. Here it’s very pedestrian and bike friendly. Our hotel had free bicycles to borrow and we definitely made the most of them. On our first full day we cycled to the University area through a long tunnel through the mountain lit by fairy lights, and returned along the coastal road and through the docks. We met up with a girl I’d connected with through a Facebook group, who showed us the best viewpoints, the rotating bridge and the train museum, and explained some of the artwork we were seeing.

On day 2 we took the bikes to the Lotus pond, which is surrounded by temples. The most interesting one has a tiger and dragon with open mouths you enter the temple through, but unfortunately is currently completed covered by scaffolding. You can still go inside the dragon and tiger pagoda through some very attractive rips in the poster covering the entrance, and there are many other interesting temples, pagodas, pavilions and statues in and around the lake. We had planned to head from the lake back to the waterfront and take the bikes on the ferry across to Cijin Island, but just as we were passing the hotel it began to rain, so we gave up on those plans, especially as we’d already cycled almost 20km. We still went out in the evening after the rain had stopped visited a night market that had popped up outside the hotel and then to see the waterfront area at night with the installations all lit up.

The next day we headed to the island in the morning, since we’d missed it the day before. It’s a small man made stretch of land that protects the harbour, with a lighthouse and old fort on the hill at one end, a long beach that we decided against cycling all the way down, and a main street full of street food carts offering all kinds of weird things. We tried a mustard shrimp sausage and a calamari sausage, a fried oyster fritter, and battered potatoes with plum powder. Then we headed back to the hotel to return the bikes and pick up our bags. Before moving on to our next town we headed out to a large Buddha statue on the end of town, thinking it’d be a 20 minute visit and then we’d be back on the train. It turned out to be an enormous complex of monasteries, temples and museums. We only had time to visit the newest section, a museum complex with the enormous statue at the top, which housed the sacred relic of one of Buddha’s teeth. There are three tooth relics in the world, and we actually visited another of them in Sri Lanka last October. This was a very different experience – large modern halls, not very many visitors and silence observed – compared to the clamour of people hoping to get a glimpse in Sri Lanka while musicians played and the relic was processed around the temple. It would have been great to have more time to explore more of the museums and temples here, but we had to leave for the train.

It was a more rushed intro to Taiwan than anticipated – we planned to stay a week in Kaohsiung and not have too much to do since it’s not a hugely touristy city. But of course everywhere in the world has points of interest and hidden gems, and we found other cities we wanted to add to the plan too, so it’s hard to stay still, and our itinerary is growing and growing! Maybe we’ll get the hang of slow travel one day.

Thanks for following along on my crazy adventures!

 Ros ♥

If you’re interested in how I got here, or where I went next, check out the rest of the story!