Kenting National Park Visit

KENTING NATIONAL PARK VISIT: VERY FUN and EDUCATIONAL TOO!!



$250 American dollars bought us a wonderful adventure, including hotel room in a luxurious setting, buffet dinner and buffet breakfast, swimming in our choice of fanciful swimming pools, two tours of the Park (one, to a fabulous Marine Biology Aquarium and the other, to incredible ocean views of coral reefs and surfing waves etc), !! AND we also had the unique experience of being both a linguistic and racial minority. This YoYo Beach and Resort Hotel had no other Caucasians at all. It clearly is a deluxe hotel that caters to Taiwanese and mainland Chinese families on holiday. It is a fantastic place to bring kids! It even bills itself as as YoYo Kids Hotel! There are kid-friendly swimming pools, waterslides, events scheduled almost every hour for kids to paint or draw or see a play or dance or tumble in a gym or read children's books, or go to a story time or to an arcade or you name it! Everyone was so happy and friendly and helpful to the obviously not Taiwanese couple who were also there!! We loved it!

Early Sat morning, we dutifully, with ONE suitcase in hand (Ted's hand; aren't you impressed, gals, that I did not need my own separate suitcase??!), climbed down the steps carefully, rolled our bag down the street to the subway (about 3/4 to 1 mile away), boarded the clean metro and travelled about another half hour to the High Speed Railway Station in Kaohsiung, which also houses the bus stop for Kenting. By the way, just to add another comment about riding the subways in Kaohsiung versus those in New York : people here are friendly on the subway; they talk to us, they make eye contact, they smile! A funny aside to that: when we came to a stop before our destination, a Taiwanese woman came frantically rushing to ask the first people she saw who were nearest the door if she was on the right metro. Unfortunately for her, WE were the couple sitting nearest the door. She blanched, did an about face and quickly, before the doors would close, asked the persons across from us, learned it was the wrong subway for her, and out she flew. After she left, the person across from us laughed with us at the poor woman's reaction when she realized she was asking the ONLY non-Taiwanese speaking people in the car for directions!

We arrived at the YoYo Hotel , checked into our very nicely appointed bedroom, with one king and two twin beds (!)just in time for our afternoon tour.




It was great; we went to a fabulous National Marine Biology and Aquarium Museum. Mainers: check out their lobster in this museum!



Laid out in three large, multi-floor buildings, this place was HUGE and really well done; it was technologically sophisticated beyond anything we have ever seen in the States. It had enormous tanks for different species, from penguins to sting rays, to puffins, to sunken ships and beyond, it was a wow!

That evening, we had a buffet dinner at the hotel, with food we recognized and food we did not.
Today, our morning tour began early (7:50am) and we saw the eastern or Pacific side of Taiwan, stopping at beautiful and interesting places, including a Maine-like lighthouse, coral reef shorelines, crashing ocean surf (Ted even found a body surfing beach but there was no time to surf it!) and a special tea place where the woman served up this supposedly special tea (it was good!) and we were helped in the endeavor by one of the Mainland Chinese tourists on our tour bus.





But along with the fantastic beauty of the scenery we saw at each stop in the Park, today was unbelievably WINDY. We were buffeted about everywhere!





Two specific highlights of today's tour include the following: one, the natural gas leaks in fissures in the ground, that explode into a fire if one drops a warm ash into it (which is how this area was discovered);





and the other, a rock formation that the Taiwanese have name, "Nixon's Rock." What do you think??
We returned to our hotel in time to take a quick swim and have a ham and cheese croissant for lunch (it tastes good every once in a while to have something sort of familiar to our taste buds!)and delicious iced coffee (well, I had the iced coffee; Ted, a beer!). We then found hammocks on the beach and read until it was time for our bus ride back (it takes about two and one-half hours) to Kaohsiung! We are tired but so glad we did the weekend!