trip to southern Taiwan: Kenting and Kaohsiung

This weekend I've been travelling to the south of Taiwan (Taipei is in the north) to Kenting and Kaoshiung (the 2nd biggest city in Taiwan) together with my friend Jiaxiasha. From Taipei we took a highspeed train (300kmh!) and got to Kaohsiung in under 2hours. From there we had to move on to Kenting with a rather slow bus and that took about 2-3 hours for the remaining 20% of distance :-/
However this was totally worth it as the south has a tropical climate so that we enjoyed our first day with 35° at a sunny beach - oh yeah!

In the evening we also got to taste lots of delicious stuff at the local nightmarket. Our most exquisite aquisition was a fried Oreo (and fried Snickers as well as Mars) that turned out to be not that bad. Massively filling though.

Fried Oreo - mjami!

The only bummer was that our hotels oceanview turned out to be more of a metal board view, which was placed right in front of our window^^

For the next day we had planned to go to a relatively nearby national Park to go for a good hike. First we tried to take the cheap option - getting there by bus ... and got lost immediately.
After failing to ask locals for help (because of our insufficient Chinese skills) at a local 7/11 they called a taxi for us and after that we ended up having our private driver for the rest of the day: He drove us to the national park, picked us up from there later, then drove us to a hot spring place, waited there for us for 2h and finally drove us back to our hotel in Kenting :D And that cost us only 25€ each - for more than 8h of having a private driver! I could certainly never afford that in Germany^^

The hiking was also pretty cool. When we arived at the park, the guides there told us that the park would close in about 4h and the hike up the mountain would take around 4 so we should go for the 2h waterfall hike. We thought "Challenge accepted!" though and went up the mountain. Partially running, we managed to do the mountain hike in 2 and ended up doing the waterfall hike as well in a total of 3,5h! In your face, parkguide!
Lots of pictures here:

on the top!

Whats this?!

Duiring the hike, the sky looked like it would rain soon, so to diversify my risk I made a bet with Jiaxiasha that it would rain and whos wrong would have to pay our ride to the hotsprings.

of course it didn't rain :-/
...hm that's a good thing though, right?!

pretty cool trees!

Snakes and bees!!!

"accomodation population 5 people" - Ja ne is kla!
actually the English on signs here is often pretty bad and you sometimes have to guess the intended meaning. Its like they used google translate...

Monkey!!! First monkey I have ever seen in wildlife!

The hotsprings afterwards were the best thing I could have imagined for that evening. Soooo incredibly relaxing after the hike! If you come to Taiwan - go there!

The next day we also spent at the beach and moved to Kaohsiung in the evening. For our stay there I had found an extremely cheap hotel (22€/night total in citycenter) and we were quite curious how it would be. Again I found that its always like "you get what you pay for" and there was a lot of mold around and this bathroom:

WTF? Watching people taking a shit instead of watching TV or what?! :-/

However Kaohsiung was quite cool. We rented bikes at the local bike scheme (similar to Paris Vélib') and biked around pretty much the whole day. After checking out in the evening we even biked our stuff to the far off train station^^
Here some impressions of Kaohsiung:

eating a snickers - it seems I fell in love with snickers since I came to Asia. Eat at least 3/week. They are so practical! :D

more fancy trees. These Taiwanese trees are definitely my favorite trees right after palm trees! :D

Kaohsiungs iconic 85 Sky Tower. Interestingly it's supposed to look like the Chinese character 高 which means tall and is part of the city's name.

cool view from top of the tower. Note that huge yellow duck on the left!

everyone here seems to be crazy about this giant duck. I heard it's some kind of art project and this duck is actually travelling around the world

Lihong and the giant duck

ducks everywhere!

hanging out at an old Brithish consulate at the coast.

Such a nice place there!

some Taiwanese girls wanted to take pictures with us - sure! :D

temple...

meeting some local children at a restaurant. They were very fond of us saying "Whazzzuup?" - Scary movie style
And I learned to say "high five" in Chinese from them - jizhang! :D

goodbye Kaohsiung

That's it, next weekend I'll travel to Singapore with Anker, Jiaxiasha and Tientien!
More about this in a week ;-)