Tour Of TaiwanSouth To Kenting

With the keys of a new car in hand, I wanted to take a road trip. Driving in bumper to bumper traffic is exciting and all, but I wanted to take the new car out on the open road. As it turned out, I had not seen most of this country. My sister's school starts later this month, so she came along for the ride. This was her last chance to have any time off until they take a break around the new year.

Our first stop was Kenting, possibly the most popular vacation spot in the entire country. Maybe going on a Saturday was not the best idea. The drive from Kaohsiung to Kenting takes two hours. We got there in about an hour and fifteen minutes. There was no traffic, until we hit Kenting, and I might have exceeded the speed limit on the freeway once or twice.

Kenting is known for its tropical beaches, tropical national park, and tropical scenery. Lily and I were immediately unimpressed with the beaches. They might be the most popular beaches in Taiwan, and Taiwan is a mostly subtropical island with more than a few empty beaches. This should be a beach paradise, but Chinese culture is not fond of the sun or living near water. Just like Hong Kong, Taiwan could have some amazing beaches if the people wanted them. Instead, most beaches look like abandoned campsites, with ocean debris and more than a few dead fish and birds. Kenting is better groomed, but the beaches are small and, if you have ever been to a decent beach in any part of the world that appreciates beaches, nothing special.

The national park is a nice place for a hike and a great place if you like watching birds and butterflies. Most people seemed to spend most of their time in the village of Hengchun, which is the closest thing to a downtown around the national park, with all the hotels, restaurants, night market, and gas stations.

One of the biggest attractions that has nothing to do with nature is the Eluanbi Lighthouse. It looks pretty much like a lot of lighthouses, except that it is surrounded by an old fort. As the story goes, the Chinese authorities who controlled Taiwan in the 1870s did not particularly care that Japanese and European ships were crashing against Cape Eluanbi, so some French and British engineers built a lighthouse. Naturally, the locals were not too excited about being invaded, so the Chinese military built a fort to protect the construction and later the lighthouse itself. Why the Chinese sided with the Europeans against the Taiwanese over a lighthouse they never cared about is unclear. It may have simply been part of their long term goal of doing everything possible to alienate the indigenous population. In the beginning, the fort protected the lighthouse from the Taiwanese. Over the years, it had to protect Taiwan from the Japanese, Chinese, Americans, and then the Chinese again. The lighthouse is still functional today, though the fort is nothing more than a tourist attraction.

We had dinner at Smokey Joe's, a “Tex Mex” restaurant that reminded neither of us of Texas or Mexico. Their menu was mostly a combination of Taiwanese and standard “international”, but they also had burritos, quesadillas, and nachos, which are rare in Taiwan. The only reason we went to Smokey Joe's was because there is one in Kaohsiung, within walking distance of our apartment. We have never been there, and when we saw one in Kenting, we figured we might as well try it out. If we ever go to the one in Kaohsiung, it will definitely not be on a Saturday night.

We ended our night with a walk around the carnival atmosphere of downtown and the night market, mostly in the rain. Summer is the rainy season, and Kenting has the most tropical climate of the entire country. Rain or sun, Saturday night during summer was still too crowded to move around. Only a typhoon could have dispersed that kind of crowd.

We stayed at a tiny B&B relatively close to downtown, which was a good idea since parking downtown was difficult, while parking around the national park was surprisingly easy. There are a wide variety of hotels in the area, from expensive resorts to a room in someone's house. Since Kenting is the most popular vacation spot in the entire country, there are enough rooms for everybody. We wanted to plan as little as possible on this trip and go wherever the road took us. We also wanted to spend as little money as possible since one of us has no job and the other just spent a small fortune on a new car. That meant spending the night in a tiny B&B relatively close to downtown.

Where I come from, a B&B is usually a large house that the owner converted into a cozy hotel, with breakfast in the dining room and tourist brochures in the foyer. The system is relatively the same in Taiwan, except that the owner might not live anywhere near the property, and the house or individual rooms have a theme that has nothing to do with when the house was built or its location. We stayed at a B&B near Kenting National Park that decorated its rooms with cartoon characters. We were in the Doraemon Room.

The only reason we even spent the night in Kenting was because we knew we would be driving up most of the east coast the next day. We know there are plenty of places to sleep on the west coast, but the east was unknown to us. Discovering something new was part of the reason for this road trip.

Kenting is the kind of place that everyone in Taiwan should go to at least once. There are a few points of interest, and I suppose it is nice to say we have been to the southern tip of the island, but I can't imagine going all the way there from Taipei on purpose. If you live farther away than Kaohsiung, once might just be enough.