Little Liu Qiu, Part 3

The theme of Day 2 on Little Liu Qiu was Hot.

We bought a pass to 3 tourist attractions for NT$100 each. I think we only went to 2.

First up was the Beauty Caves. These were mostly boardwalk footpaths and stairways heading to some small caves:

There were also some nice views of the water.

But we were already wilting a little.

And yes, my outfit is entirely inappropriate. To be fair, those are linen pants. But I was quite unprepared for the heat.

After that it was onto the "Pig Ditch", which sounded unpromising but turned out to be a number of short, interlocking hiking paths up the side of a hill. The map promised walks of 20-50 minutes for each path; each one generally took us a few minutes, even with stopping to comment on how unbearably hot it was.


There were, however, some spots that were difficult for foreigners wtih backpacks.


There was a perfectly-located ice cream stand. I was quite excited. But I couldn't quite eat the whole thing.

Since the ice cream stand doubled as a betel nut stand, I got a close-up of betel nut being processed. They take the actual fruit, put on a glob of lime (the chemical, not the fruit) and roll it in the green leaf. I'm not sure if the leaf comes from the betel nut trees or not.

Then, it was back to the port for our ferry back to the mainland.

Overall, it was a nice place. I liked that it wasn't such a hike to get to, like Kenting seems to be. There was a nicish beach and snorkeling that I didn't take advantage of- oh, well. It also seems to be set up with bike routes on all the major roads. I'm not sure if I'd want to bike there, though- honestly the English maps were all incomprehensible, and Dany and I are pretty good map-readers. I didn't see any Chinese maps that were any better, but they may exist.

Little Liu Qiu Part 2

The ferry ride over was easy- around 20 minutes and no seasickness. It’s common in touristy areas to have an old woman (“ama”) harrass you into buying/renting/doing something, and as soon as we got off the ferry, ama was there to offer us scooters. I gave Danyall a quick lesson and we were off! She did quite well once she got the hang of it.

The ama took us to see a hotel room which was OK and not too expensive, but she was kinda driving us nuts and I had a few numbers written down from the Little Liu Qiu website (which is the best tourist website I’ve seen in Taiwan, hands down). A few phone calls and a quick scooter trip later, we found a very cute hotel right next to the water (although it was kind of on a cliff) where we each got our own bed! Here’s the view from our patio:

Looking all the way across to mainland Taiwan! Here’s another view, I think maybe from a different point on the island?

We rode our scooters around kind of randomly- the island is small but has a lot of roads that all seem to interconnect, and maps and direction signs proved to be not terribly helpful. But basically we were never more than 15 minutes from our hotel and never had to worry about being lost, even though we never really knew where we were!

The famous “vase rock” and a shot of beautiful waters:

Me, imitating Dany’s slimming model pose:

The model-free view from the pagoda (there are these little pagodas all over that aren’t a temple in that no worship is conducted there, they’re just there for… rest? I don’t know).

The sun sat on our day…

We had planned on having BBQ at our hotel, but when I called to confirm that we would come they were like “It starts in 10 minutes! Get here now” so we settled for a very Taiwanese meal of fried noodles, cabbage, and papaya milk. Dany had been beginning to think I never eat Chinese food!

Then it was back to the hotel. We relaxed a while in the chairs overlooking the ocean, then headed to bed early. The hotel people knocked on our door and told me about some special excursion to the sea that would take place at 11 pm. It was free and we would see something special. OK, I didn’t totally understand everything they said. They were so surprised when we said we were too tired. They also kept bringing us stuff- weird Taiwan soup which I did eat, and fried blood rice, which uh we didn’t.

Little Liu Qiu- Part 1

I gave Danyall a few choices for short trips in Southern Taiwan, and she chose this island of Xiao Liu Qiu because it would be a chance for her to ride a scooter.

We rode the High Speed Rail down to Kaohsiung- I am quite the HSR addict as it's faster and also so much pleasanter than the regular rail, in that there are no random Taiwanese people without seats standing over you and coughing.

From the HSR station we made our way to a bus station near the Kaohsiung Train Station. We had to ride a bus to the port town of Dongguan and then a ferry to Little Liu Qiu. It was pretty easy to get a ticket to the right place and we only had to wait a few minutes for the bus. When we got on a man had a little discussion with the bus driver and then asked us (all in Chinese) if we're going to Little Liu Qiu (yes) and told us that the bus didn't go to the port, just to the bus station, and did we know how to get from there to the port? (no) So he said he'd take us to the ferry place. I said he was too polite, we don't want to trouble him, etc, but he was very nice and insisted he'd help us. It was funny, I heard him on the phone later telling someone he'd be a little late because he was going to help some foreign friends (waiguo pengyou, which is what they often call us foreigners).

So we got off the bus and he was like "Follow me!" We walked after him at a pretty fast pace and arrived at a bank. Apparently he was a boss there and told two workers to take us to the ferry terminal. This kind of random helpfulness is not entirely without precedent but a little over the top even for Taiwan. There wasn't much discussion- by the time I figured out what was going on our bags were on scooters and we were being beckoned to jump on the back. The south of the island is a little different from the north in that they don't really believe in things like "helmets" and "traffic laws." But I think they took it easy for our sakes!

Here's Danyall with our drivers in their bank uniforms- I'm sure they had a funny story to tell about their workday when they got home- "So we were having fun because our boss wasn't there- and they he showed up with these 2 enormous foreingers and told us to take them to ride the ferry..."

Later I'll tell you what happened when we actually got to the island. But seriously, having Danyall here reminded me of how darn nice Taiwan people are.