Our short but sweet stop in Kaohsiung was so lovely it deserves its own spot on the blog! Because we booked our train journey from Tainan to Taitung the day before, we ended up with a stop in the city of Kaohsiung. Kaohsiung is Taiwan’s third largest city, and somewhere we sadly didn’t have time to stay a few nights in. However, we were excited to have a few hours to explore the area around the train station.
After a final morning walk around the streets of Tainan, we took a taxi to the train station. Our train station routine is pretty simple - go to a convienence store and pick up our favorite cold noodles, some average coffee, and usually m&ms or another sweet treat. Then we park up on the train, and while away the hours listening to music or a podcast, enjoying our snacks, and watching the world go past. Unfortuantely the train ride from Tainan to Kaohsiung was quite short, only 45 minutes, so not much time to soak it all up.
Once we got to Kaohsiung we dropped our bags in the station lockers (SUCH a good service), and rented some U-bikes. We spent the next hour and a half cycling to, and around, what was marked on the map as ‘Lotus Pond’. What it actually was though, was a large beautiful lake surrounded by Buddhist, Confucius and Taoist temples. We didn’t stop and look at any in particular, but we really enjoyed looking at them from the bike! The weather was beautiful and it was so nice to be outside stretching the legs (with the electric pedal assist), during our break between trains. The temples all seemed to be on the newer side, with lots of elaborate and beautiful decorations. Many were so large and prolific you could see them from the other side of the lake, and some stretched out over the banks of the lake. At one end of the lake there was also a wakeboarding park, where you get pulled along by a cable and do tricks on rails and jumps in the water. We saw some people giving it a go, but it must have been ameteur hour as no tricks were involved!
We found a great coffee shop by the lake, and checked to see if we could still order coffee in Mandarin. English is much more widely spoken here compared to Mainland China, so we haven’t been needing to use our language skills (or lack of) as much. Thankfully we could still order a coffee, but some hand gestures were definitely still needed for the finer points. However, I’m pretty sure the young guy running the shop spoke English, and was just letting us practise!
Before too long we were back at the station. After another mini-mart visit and a sadly unsuccessful attempt getting boba tea, we were lining up for our next train journey. This one was a bit longer, about two hours, and we were very excited to be heading even further south east to the coast. We arrived in Taitung city at about 5:30 PM, and the bus to Dulan left just before 6 PM, making for a very easy transfer. As we made our way along the beautiful coastal roads we both commented on how fun it would be to drive these roads on a scooter, an insight into what’s to come!