We Touched the Tip

My older brother Chris arrived from LA on Tuesday night. We spent the rest of the week exploring Chiayi and on Saturday we drove to Kanding National Park with Joe and Fiona. The park is pretty large and appears to cover the entire southern tip of Taiwan. We spent midday hiking some trails where we could see craggy coral mounds jutting out of the hillside. We saw a lot of butterflies, too -- apparently 106 species have been identified in the park. We also saw a goat, crab, various insects, and monkeys. The monkeys were a surprise... I didn't know monkeys lived here.

In the afternoon we visited the lighthouse, built by a Brit in 1882, and hiked a trail that goes around the tip of the island. The lighthouse was closed for the holidays, so we didn't get to go inside.

Finally we decided we'd better head to Baisha (white sand) beach, which is on the western side of the tip, to catch the sunset. The beach was lovely -- small and protected -- and hosted a fair number of people on shore but only two swimming in the waves. We arrived about thirty minutes before sunset. The boys put on their suits and jumped right in. I hadn't planned on swimming --- but then a wave caught my foot and it was WARM. So I ripped off my clothes on the spot and dove in. Not all of my clothes. And I didn't dive. But it was lovely, lovely, lovely, warm, clean, translucent blue water. We swam around and completely forgot to watch the sun set... the water was too wonderful.

It took a while to drag Joe out of the water, but when we finally did we dried off and made the long drive back to Chiayi in the dark. We didn't get back to town until after 9, so we stopped downtown and had a late dinner on the patio of a sushi restaurant. Ah, exhaustion... today we're recuping because tonight is Lantern Festival! The town has been prepping all week (and longer, I'm sure). Should be beautiful.

I'm trying to upload more photos, but uploading here takes eons, so they'll be trickling into my picasa album over the next several days. Just click on my "Taiwan" slideshow on the righthand side of this page to view them.