In the Company of Kaohsiung

The next few days around Taiwan involved me heading further south to a town called Kaohsiung. The goal was to make it to Kenting National Park, but I was running out of time (or so I thought. More on that later)! I took a train from Hualien to get to Kaohsiung (later than I would've liked due to my indecisiveness) and arrived in the afternoon. After exiting the train station and pausing to get my bearings, I was approached my a university student that attempted to voraciously sell me pen, yes a pen! He said it was to raise money for his tuition, and I might've been inclined to assist him except the pen he was trying to sell me (more like steal from me) was 300 TWD or almost 10 USD. Maybe he thought I was some fresh off the boat/plane/train idiot that didn't realize the conversion rate. So anyway with my new pen, I headed to the hostel, just kidding! The hostel, called Cozy Planet, was a converted 3 bedroom flat that was kept in pristine condition. I literally arrived, threw my stuff down, then asked the owner Sam about taking one of the loaner bikes they had for an evening tour of the city!

I got lost! No matter, I finally made it to the former British Consulate all while befriending an equally lost Australian fella!

We didn't spend too much time there but next headed to the famous river walk, which was a bit difficult to enjoy since it began to rain . . . hard!


We wanted to eat dinner somewhere, but couldn't find anything except TGI Friday's and Outback, which I refused to eat at. So, we settled for a mixture of a Taiwanese mall food court, street food, and 7/11. I biked home, met my dorm mate who was on the tail end of her travels before heading back to the US, exchanged stories, sampled some Taiwanese wine and liquor the hostel provided, then hit the hay!

I woke up fairly early Friday morning to take the bike and do more exploring. This day was a fairly relaxed one, but one that covered a lot of ground, and one that I enjoyed a lot. I went back to the river walk which has a nice trail and just biked biked biked until the river turned away from the city. The day wasn't super sunshiny, but it was perfect for bike




I should say that I almost ended up on the "interstate" flyover with my bicycle due to some poor shortcut calculations and some bad map reading. Fortunately, disaster was averted, but I did have to physically carry the bicycle over some concrete barriers and by some puzzled (or angry) police officers. I headed to Lotus Lake and leisurely biked all around the lake.



The lake is rather large with many statues and temples



and I decided to stop at one of the cafes to have some bubble tea and admire my trustworthy companion!



I planned ahead and took a direct non confusing route from the lake and biked back to downtown to see the Love Pier (which I didn't find all that lovey or romantic) and Taiwan's second largest building called the Tuntex Sky Tower

and a random building that I thought was kind of strange. It's design is such that as you are on higher floors, the amount of room decreases significantly (my guess is each floor is 1/3 less than the one below it). I wonder what the purpose of this design was or the incentive to live on a higher floor is.



Biked back to the hostel, returned the bike, then hopped on the bullet train from Kaohsiung to Taipei (a 90 minute ride instead of 4 hours). Nobody sitting next to me, which allowed me to enjoy my 7/11 boxed meal without any embarrassment from accidentally flinging food while using the chopsticks!