Kaohsiung's Port Area

Kaohsiung is Taiwan's second biggest city and most southern. From Tainan it's only 30 minutes by train (if you get the fastest one), so we often go down there on the weekend. It also has one of the biggest ports in Asia, and that area is actually quite interesting to look around.

We took the MRT to Xiziwan (or Sizihwan as they spell it), and directly opposite the station entrance is a place to rent bicycles for 100NT a day. They give you a map with cycle route which is handy. We headed towards the docks, to where there's a nice cycle path along a disused railway, and passes through an area called the Pier 2 Art District.

We'd been here before to attend a gig by Taiwan's biggest metal band Chthonic (Joël reviewed it on his other blog here) but this time had more time to wander around. The area is made up of old warehouses which have been turned into gallery spaces, studios and so on, which sculptures and murals dotted around. Identical statues of a fat man and fat woman have been put along the railway, and it seems are regularly painted with new designs by different artists.

When we were there last there were several exhibitions by visual arts students, and the previous time one small gallery had one based around cartoon characters such as Tofu Oyaku, so they change quite frequently. Nestled amongst all the galleries, looking like one itself as it too is housed in an old warehouse decorated with murals of workers, as the Kaohsiung Museum of Labour. As it was just after May Day, they had a special exhibition, which was very nicely laid out, and would probably have been very interesting if it had anything other than the headings translated into English.

From there you can head towards the Love River, which has a cycle path free of scooters, and some cafés and bars, though in the evening it can get crowded. Before you reach the river is the Love Pier from where you can get a ferry to Qijin Island.  As well as fresh seafood the island has a lighthouse by an old Chinese fort on a hill overlooking the island, which is fun to wander around. There's also an OK beach and a good cycle path with views along the cliff.

Further along there should be views of the port but we didn't get that far. You can see the giant container ships from the cliff top though, and from the "Wind Park", one of those typically Taiwanese areas set up with colourful little statues for kids to play on, windmills to be the backdrop to your photos, a grassy area to fly kites on (despite the signs saying no kites) and some snack stall. Another ferry takes you  to near where you rent the bicycles, so you don't have to ride all the way round again.

Not far from there is Shoushan, also known as Monkey Mountain, a big hill covered in forest that contains a zoo and of course monkeys. If you have food, they might be aggressive, but when we went they were very calm and fluffy, not like the dirty aggressive ones in India. There may be a bus that goes there but we got a bit lost when we tried, so it might be easiest to take a taxi or go by scooter as we eventually did.

The bus we thought was taking us there actually took us around the foot of the mountain, past the university and up along the cliff. There you can find lots of nice little cafés overlooking the sea. Some even claim to have scones! The best time to go is on an afternoon when there's a typhoon approaching but the rain hasn't reached land yet, so you can watch the waves crashing on to the rocks below with a moody dark sky as backdrop. You can even imagine you can see the eye of the approaching storm, a dark column going down to the water… Just make sure you have a rain coat, and if you're going by bus check when the last one leaves.

Joël's photos of Kaohsiung can be found here.

Welcome to our blog!

This used to be just Joël's blog for a trip back at the end of 2006, but we're resurrecting it to be a general travelling and stuff blog. We've been living in Tainan, Taiwan for the last 20 months or so, and will be here for about another 4 so to start with we'll probably be concentrating on cool stuff we've seen around here. We might also post stuff about places we've been previously, such as our 2008 trip to India and Nepal. To see photos from our trips you can visit our photo sites:

Axicon Photos
Joël's Photos

Java & Bali

(11/2/2007-17/2/2007)

If anyone reading this goes to Indonesia and has the choice of taking a bus run by the Damri company, then take it. This was the company of the bus that took us from Banda Lampung on Sumatra to Bandung on Java, and it was the best bus we had in South-East Asia. It had Winnie the Pooh blankets and pillows for everyone, working footrests,plenty of space in each row, a sealed area at the back for smokers so they weren't allowed to smoke anywhere else, and despite it being a night journey, which apparently is generally considered an ideal time to play really awful pop music really loudly, there was no music at all! As if all that wasn't good enough, we even arrived at our destination almost 2 hours early! As this was at 4.20 in the morning, we were able to skip Bandung completely and take the first train to Yogyakarta (pronounced "Jogjakarta", or just "Jogja"), which was far more comfortable than a bus despite being a couple of hours late. As Sally spent 6 months here when she was doing her degree, for once we had no problem findingaccommodation, places to eat, or places to do our laundry.

The next day we booked our "travel" (minibus) for the next day, then went for a walk around town, visiting the Sultan's palace (the sultan is still in charge ofJogja ), and the Sultan's water palace where he would bathe with his wives and children and meet his concubines etc. It then started to rain, so we got a bus up to near where Sally used to live and stayed in aninternet café until it stopped, and then it was time for a dinner of ayam bakar (grilled chicken and rice, Sally's favourite). We then had time to collect laundry, do a bit of shopping for journey supplies, and then had beer and pancakes at a bar where we met a crazy Australian from Alice Springs, studying in Darwin. The next day was not very exciting as we travelled by minibus toBromo . The lady sitting next to me kept jumping due to the incredibly bad and dangerous driving of both our driver and everyone else on the road, but after nearly 2 months in South-East Asia I was used to it and just slept. The most exciting thing to happen was when we realised that our water bottle which had been on top of the engine and in the sun had got hot enough to make hot chocolate, which we did by adding chocolate flavoured sweetened condensed milk from thesqueezy, screw-top packet that we'd bought. Eventually, after some winding mountain roads, we arrived at the village near Bromo, an active volcano, and due to the lack of tourists were able to get a very nice room in a hotel.

Others in or minibus had been persuaded to go on a trip to see the sunrise, so had to get up at 4am, but we decided to have a couple of days there, so just got up at 9, had breakfast, and then went walking across a volcanic wasteland of cooled lava to MountBromo , which steamed in the middle. We were escorted by a horse guide who wanted us to pay for him to walk us across on his horse, but wepreferred to walk, so he cantered off after a while. It was pretty hot, there was no shelter, and we didn't return until after 1 so we got quite badlysunburnt despite all the suncream we put on. To get to the rim of the volcano there we some crumbling steps, and at the top there was a fence of plastic tubing to stop you falling into the steaming crater that smelt of sulphur, a guy trying to sell us flowers to throw in as an offering (a few minutes later we saw him climbing down to pick those that hadn't reach out again!), and a lady selling drinks and stuff. In theory you could walk all the way along, but the fence only stretched across a few metres, andsome of the edge looked pretty thin and crumbly, so we didn't. Having seen enough volcano for one day, we went down to the Hindu temple at the foot of the neighbouring extinct volcano, and got a ride back on horses after some bargaining. We ended the day by watching the sunset with an Indonesian expat (the lady who'd sat next to me on the minibus), her daughter, and an Indonesian couple, then all had dinner together before we went to book our onward travel and the trip to the viewpoint for sunrise the next day, which we'd been convinced was worth it.

Sadly this meant we had to get up at 3.40am for our drive in a jeep through the dark, occasionally lit by some cool lightning in some clouds which luckily turned out to be behind us when watching the sunrise. It turned out that it really was worth it, as the huge extinct crater containing Mt.Bromo and it's neighbour was filled with mist, so it looked like a scene from Jurassic Park, the clouds didn't hide the sun but there were enough to look pretty in the red light, and best of all was the even more active Mt.Semira which erupted twice in the 30-45 minutes we were there with a huge cloud of smoke. Once the sun had risen, the jeep took us down to Mt.Bromo for other people to climb it, but as we'd already done that with hardly anyone else there, we didn't feel like doing it with a crowd of tourists, and instead stayed at the bottom, Sally joking with the horse guides, and laughing at the tourists being lead on their horses up the 5 or 10 minute walk to the steps, several with their video cameras out.

Then it was back for breakfast (including coffee which we turned into moccha by adding our chocolate condensed milk) and into the local bus to Probolingo where we had to wait for our bus to Denpasar on Bali, passing the time by letting a nice young Indonesian guy practice his English, who told us he wanted to be the next Kasparov. Our bus was OK, although they refused to give us our complimentary meal that all the Indonesian passengers got, but once we were on the ferry across to Bali we got a great view ofvolcanoes (presumably extinct) silhouetted against the sunset lit sky. Arriving in Denpasar was surprisingly hassle free, as the first taxi driver we asked agreed to use the meter, and the hotel the Indonesian expat lady had recommended to us turned out to be pretty nice and reasonable, with a swimming pool, breakfast and all. Dinner was also pretty good as I discovered a mega-sandwich including chicken, pineapple,avocado, mayonnaise, and more.

The next day was more fun, beginning with a swim in the hotel pool, then breakfast, a quick spell on the internet as at the last minute I decided I didn't want to got to Hong Kong, China, and elsewhere on my own but go to Australia with Sally, so I had to activate a visa and buy a plane ticket, and then we went toWaterbom Park. This is a great place full of waterslides you can go on in tubes, on mats, or just on your own (including a great one called Boomerang where you go down a flume in a tube, come shooting out and up avertical wall then down over a bump into a pool), a "river" you can float around in on your tube, various pools, and bubble tea! When that shut we went shopping for presents and stuff, had dinner, and finished with beer and ice cream.

Our last day in Indonesia began similarly, only with dragon fruit for breakfast as well (a large pink skinned fruit with odd scale-like bits, which inside is white with black seeds, and tastes a bit like the seeds in kiwi fruit), then we had to pack and check out as our plane was that evening. We spent most of the day shopping, with periodic breaks for ice with jellies, cocktails, beer, swimming on the beach, and a tasty dinner of chicken and coconut. Then we got a taxi to the airport for all the joys of checking in, finally leaving just after midnight on our plane, meaning that now Sally and I have travelled together on all popular forms of transport (as well as a few more unpopular ones). A few hours later we were in Australia, and I was (almost) done with long distance travel for a while.

Sumatra

(30/1/2007-10/2/2007)

Despite having to get up at 7 to get the ferry, it didn't leave until 10. It was only a small passenger one, and moved quite a lot in the waves. As the inside was filled with the usual dreadful music, we spent most of the day on deck until it got too hot. It was pretty boring, especially as the journey lasted 9 hours instead of the 4 or 5 it was meant to, so when we finally arrived in Indonesia it was too late to get the bus to where we wanted to go so we had to spend a night in Medan. All the hotels were pretty crappy, so we decided to take the $2 or $3 dollar one, consisting of a mattress on the floor of a room with cardboard walls in a place called Spoutnik, as it was only for one night. To make things better we had a desert of some insanely rich cake/pancake thing with chocolate, peanut and a non-cheesy cheese and Sally being able to speak Indonesian made things alot easier than they had been in some other places, as well as more interesting as conversations weren't limited to basic English.

Where we wanted to go was Bukit Lawang to see the orangutang rehabilitation centre, but we didn't have time to do a full jungle trek as the guides at the hotel tried to persuade us to do, and certainly not one pushed on us like that. So the next day, after having a lie in to make up of being woken at some stupid hour by the mosque next door, with the help of a guide who was going back there anyway (he also wanted to get us to go on a trek with him, but didn't push too hard so it wasn't too annoying), we took first a betchak (kind of sidecar thing), then a bemo (minivan), then a minibus, and finally another betchak to get there. It was a small village by some rapids with several hotel type things, only a few open as tourism has kind of collapsed in Sumatra and Indonesia in general in recent years. We had the usual search for accommodation, taking longer as everything was spaced out along the bank, passing monkeys playing by one of the cafés as we went past, and settled for a room at the top of a two story hut with a basic but clean bathroom, a balcony with chairs, and no electricity but an oil lamp instead. It was so peaceful there in the jungle that the next day we managed to sleep until 4 in the afternoon! We were only woken when a group of macaques (small grey monkeys) came and ate durian (a large, disgusting smelling fruit) on our balcony and the rocks outside out window. Once we got up we walked down to the inn nearest the orangutan centre, although it was too late to see the feeding there, and had breakfast, during which on the opposite bank of the river a mother orangutan came down for a drink with her baby.

Having missed them on our first day, we made sure to get up in time for the feeding of the orangutans the next day. to reach it we had to cross the river by means of a boat pulled across my a rope around another rope spanning the rapids, which was quite fun in itself, and then after paying we were lead up a hill by two rangers to the platform. They called to the orangutans, who soon came to get their bananas, about seven or eight in total including a little young one, a mother and her baby, and one the ranger told us was pregnant, as well as some macaques trying to steal some food as well. The orangutans here were one that had been kept in captivity and had been rehabilitated, so they were semi-wild and came right up to us, one even trying to steal Sally's bag as it thought there might be bananas in it (unlikely, she hates bananas). It was so good that after playing Scrabblecards and having some pancakes, we came back for the afternoon feed. About the same number came, including a male, and this time I was able to play with the baby orangutan, holding it's hand and pulling back and forth. It's mother got very friendly with the ranger, trying to climb up him and get a piggy-back, and when that didn't work because she was too heavy she came all the way down the hill with us and sat watching them build a new rope bridge, which the ranger told us he didn't understand why they were building it "just for the queen of Spain" as then the orangutans will be able to get across the river. We finished the day by renting a couple of tubes and going tubing down the rapids, a much more informal, and certainly more dangerous way to do it than what we'd done in Laos, as the water flowed much faster, but it was pretty fun.

We decided to leave the next day, but luckily when we got up there were some Thomas Leaf monkeys in the trees nearby, which are cool black and white ones with tufts of hair like Mohawks. So that was a good start to an otherwise boring day, as we had to go all the way back to Medan through the rain, changing buses halfway, cross the city to the other bus station where (after reassuring the stall owners that we weren't Muslim, and trying to explain that we had no religion) we had some pork and got the bus to Lake Toba, a huge water filled crater of an extinct volcano. From the town on the shore we got a ferry to the island where we wanted to stay, foolishly listening to what some people had told us at Bukit Lawang and getting off at the Reggae bar, which was full, or just didn't want us to stay, so we walked down to another one called Abadi which only had two disgusting grotty rooms, but as we were tired and had made the mistake of not leaving out bags at the top before coming down the steep steps to look at the rooms, we took one of them. Combined with some ridiculously expensive noodles we had for dinner and our neighbours playing the harmonica badly late into the night, the next morning we almost felt like leaving the island and going to our next destination. However, instead we decided to spoil ourselves and walked to the nicest sounding hotel in the Lonely Planet Guide, Toba Cottages. There they gave us an off-season discount, so for $20 we basically had a house: the room was in a building built in the local traditional style, and was huge, the steps in it up to a platform where there was a mattress and a great view of the lake, the was a four poster bed, a fridge, some seats, a balcony with seats and a hammock, really nice clean bathroom with a bath and hot water, and a buffet breakfast was included, which turned out to be really nice as the place was run by a German and had a German style bakery with (obviously) German style bread, tasting even better after the woolly processed stuff we'd had to eat since leaving former French colonies.

The rest of the day was just a productive: we walked to the King's Grave, one of the supposed attractions of the island, which in itself was not that exciting but we got to see some of the island (which is really big, you could easily spend a week or two going for walks in its hills), and when we got back some other guests were watching Pirates of the Carribean 2, so we did as well, then had tempe (traditional Indonesian food made from soya) burgers, then sat on our platform reading for a while with beers kept nice and cool in our fridge. The next day we got up early to get bus tickets to Bukit Tinggi, our next destination, to enjoy our buffet breakfast and our room until check out time. As the bus wasn't until the evening, we left our bags and walked to the other "attraction", the more interesting stone chairs where judging used to take place, then came back for a swim and to get the ferry from the hotel's garden. The bus was the usual horrible South-East Asian bus journey with terrible music at stupid times of the night, screaming babies, and this time the added novelty of going along mountain roads that only seemed to be half build and so the bus could go at only about 5 miles per hour in some places...

Amazingly we got there only 2 hours late, after crossing the equator sometime during the night, and had a bit of a walk into the city, some some steps to the top of a hill, then down some others again. We had some breakfast and did the usual search for a hotel, finding one where the owner seemed to have taken a liking to us so gave us a discount. It was an OK room, without windows but not too close to the mosque, and the owner made us breakfast of fried chocolate sandwiches and tea every morning. We then went to the zoo not to see the live animals, because I hate zoos, but to see the freaky stuffed ones in the museum such as two headed goats and eight legged cows. From there we walked to the "fort" which was just an unimpressive white building, then on to a park with a view on a canyon and some tunnels the Japanese had forced locals to build while they were occupying, which were not nearly as fascinating as they sounded, and finally we had a look around the market. The day after we had thought of going to a nearby lake, but got up to late, so we had some drinks and played Scrabblecards for a bit then went for a walk, got some fruit and other snacks for the 24+ hour bus journey we had the next day, and had rendang, a local dish of spicy beef, slightly spoilt by an annoying guy trying to practice English, or get us on a tour, or something.

Our bus journey the next day started at 9am and was to go down half the length of the island to the Southern tip at Banda Lampung, so we didn't get there until about noon the following day. The bus didn't finish there though but continued to Jakarta, so it dropped us at the outskirts of the city, then we had to navigate the complicated system of bemos to get to the area with travel agents where we thought there might be hotels. We went to one travel agent to see how much their tour to the national park we wanted to go to would be, but it was stupidly expensive so we left. After a while of wandering around looking lost trying to find a hotel, an Indonesian guy in a fancy 4x4 pulled up and offered to help us because he was "a good guy", which turned out to be true, even if he claimed that God had told him to help us rather than him doing it of his own accord... He drove us around and found a reasonably cheap but decent enough hotel for us called Hotel Lusy and told us how to get to the national park, said goodbye and left. We spent the rest of the day getting bus tickets to Bandung in Java for the next day, then went wandering for snacks in a supermarket, discovering the disturbing existence of durian flavoured condoms, getting bright coloured cakes and iced tea in a plastic bag rather than a cup, and meeting a friendly betchak driver who wanted his photo taken with us, so we got it printed for him in a nearby photo shop. We finished the day with a tasty meal of pempek, a kind of dumpling.

As our bus didn't leave until the evening and the Way Kambas National Park that we wanted to go to was supposedly only 2hrs by bus, we decided to do that the next day. We got up nice and early, got first one bus, then another to get to the bus station, a third bus to a second bus station where we could get a minibus to a road and there get two ojek (motorbike taxis) to the park itself, so we didn't arrive until about 2 in the afternoon. This gave us time to have a 30 minute ride on one of the elephants they have, wandering through the bush and discovering that riding elephants is actually quite uncomfortable, at least the small type they have there. We also got to play a bit with a baby elephant and watch them bathing, and it was all quite fun even though I don't really like to see animals being used for entertainment like that, but we didn't have time to go to see the Sumatran rhinos which have some kind of rehabilitation centre there, as we had to get the motorbikes back to a small town in order to get a bus back in time for our night bus, but luckily that didn't take as long as getting there had.

Thailand to Malaysia

(25/1/2007-29/1/2007)

Everywhere was either full or grotty in the backpacker area of Bangkok, so we didn't get a room until 11. We tried to arrange a meet up with Nina who was also there, but we both fell asleep until 3 and then spend 3 hours crossing the city to get to the STA Travel office to change Sally's ticket, only to find it closed, and then that there were no buses so we had to get a taxi back. We walked up Khao San Road, the hilariously tacky tourist strip, had dinner and went to bed. The next day we had more luck, Sally managed to have her ticket changed straight away after trying in several other cities without success, then we bought our train tickets to Malaysia and we finished by 11.30. We played around in a park on the exercise equipment for a while then went to wait for Nina in case she'd got our email, but it seemed she didn't so we missed her again. Instead we got the Sky train to the ferry and the ferry to near Khao San Road to see a bit more of the city and had a tasty pad thai from a street stall followed by mango with coconut sticky rice.

The train to the Malaysian border was uneventful, apart from them making us go to bed at 6.30 in the evening, but the next day after we'd crossed the border some kid threw a rock at the train and it hit our window, which shattered with a sound like a gunshot, but didn't fall out of the frame luckily, so we just had to move away. We arrived at Butterworth where we got a ferry across to Georgetown on Pedang island to find somewhere to stay the night, which took a while, though we did find some crazy guy trying to get us to sleep in a super cheap place which was just a mattress on the floor, but we eventually found one and went to buy our tickets to Sumatra for the next day.