Our little road trip adventure starting on Thursday night. Amanda taught till about 9 pm after which we took a bus back to the dorm. We quickly went for dinner at an Taiwan Aboriginal restaurant just down the street. I had sweet and sour chicken with rice and of course a Taiwan Beer. The rest had a spicy noodle soup. We left early from the restaurant, packed up the last of our things and headed to the bus stop for midnight.

We took the Aloha bus line which would take us down to Kaohsiung (the 2nd largest city in Taiwan…about 1.2 million people). This bus was kick ass. Picture vibrating Lazy-Boy sofa’s with your own TV and video games. We stayed up for about an hour playing video games and then tried to get a few winks. We were woken up just after 3 am and were told to get off the bus. We weren’t really sure where we were but were assured that it was Kaohsiung. The city was quiet so we found the closest hotel we could find.

Low and behold it was right across the street. Asking the front desk lady how much, she indicated $800 NT (about $25). Why not right? Well for future reference to people traveling - the more you pay for a hotel room, the better (and cleaner) the hotel room. It wasn’t too bad. The bed was rock hard, the comforter was dirty, plus you could see “hairs” underneath the sheets. I quickly put it to the back of my mind. We took out a sleeping bag and used it as a comforter instead of the dirty one and went to bed.

The view from the hotel room window in the morning was a pleasant surprise. To the left, you could see the street, but to the right, you saw broken concrete and wires. Not the best of views. We headed downstairs and grabbed a pamphlet from the front desk of tourist attractions in Kaohsiung. We decided to head to Lotus Lake. We found the train station a few blocks from the hotel room and a short train ride and taxi ride later we were at our destination.

Lotus Lake is a small lake surrounded by pagodas. We walked along the lake, visiting various pagodas. It’s amazing all the small details that were put into some of the sculptures. We also each got a fortune from a machine. It’s all in Chinese so I can’t really tell you what it said.

After walking around for a bit, we headed back to the train station. We wanted to head to the pier. After talking to information at the train station she informed us to take this bus which would take us there. A 1/2 hour later the bus dropped us off at the opposite side of city to where we wanted to go! We finally got on the right bus and found the pier.

In order to get the island, you have to take a 5 minute ferry ride ($10 NT) across the pier. At the bottom of this ferry, people would take their scooters and at the top were seats for normal passengers. At this time in was nearing sunset. Like Taipei, it is smoggy here. So smoggy that everything in the distant is just a blur.

After getting to the island, we walked through a little market. There they were selling all kinds of crap (as per usual), plus all the local seafood you could think of. There Amanda made friends with a pot belly pig. Most likely to be used for food someday, it was more then willing to receive a belly rub.

After walking through the market for a while and looking at a few temples, we decided to make our way back to the hotel. On our way back, we were trying to find a place to eat dinner. For nearly 2 hours we walked the streets, but couldn’t really find anything except for side vendors who were either selling squid, chicken heads, or things I couldn’t really tell what they were. We finally headed back to the train station where there was a Starbucks. We each grabbed sandwich and then headed back to the dirty hotel room for the night.
…more to come