Revisiting Taiwan

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It's been over a year since we left Taiwan and I wanted to do a photo reflection on our 7 plus months there.

First we landed in Taipei and spent about a week. Taipei is pretty cool city and I think would seem much cooler after getting some understanding of the culture. We did not however return for any substantial amount of time. We did get to go to the top of the world's tallest building while we were there though.

From Taipei we headed to Tai-Chung the middle city to visit an old friend of Tim's studying Mandarin at a college there. From there we caught a bus to Kenting with J. Kenting was certainly a favorite spot for us, and riding the coastline ridges on scooters was a nice introduction to scooter life.

After, sending J. back to school we headed up the east coast to Taitung and eventually to Hualien. We didn't do much exploring there because getting work sounded better at that point. So, we decided to head back to Kaohsiung and begin our hunt.

After finding jobs we started to explore the country. A cool spot in Kaohsiung was what we referred to as "Monkey Mountain." We never learned the real name. There is another mountain nearby that's actually named Monkey Mountain but no Monkey's actually reside there. Our "Monkey Mountain" was the abode of lots of Monkeys.

While living in Kaohsiung we traveled a fair bit around the country but not nearly as much as we had hoped. You can find more about some of our adventures on our website. One of our favorite trips was to Puli where we again met with Justin and his friend Master Jian Yi, or Master Jenny, who is a Buddhist Nun. She gave us a grand tour of the huge temple, buddhist school, and pretty much all of Puli. We learned that Buddhists in Taiwan have some of the most amazing food, particularly vegetarian. Don't miss out on a Buddhist restaurant if you see one in Taiwan.

Taiwan has over 100 peaks that are over 3,000 meters. We had hoped to explore some of them but we'll have to do that on our next visit. We've got many friends there now.

At the very end of our stay there Natalie joined a Dragonboat team. The team was sponsored by a Health Spa/Gym that took Dragonboating very seriously. They trained for months before race time came. Dragonboat Festival is a week long national event in Taiwan that was quite a spectacle. We really enjoyed being a part of it and witnessing it. We also made a bunch of new friends that we were excited to hang out with but we departed before we ever did any more really fun things with any of these individuals, such as river-tracing. I think Taiwan is an ideal place for river-tracing. It gets you out in the mountains to explore the beautiful country and some actual freshwater which is a treat in that hot climate. Anyway, maybe next visit.

On our way home from Taiwan we laid over in Maui for Ten days. It really didn't cost us more and we already had a friend living there so it was hard to say no. You can see some photos of Maui in our photogallery as well as some more Dragonboat photos.

Cheers, Timmy

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Photos

Dragonboat Ladies
Nat's team paddling hard!

Timmy 101
I'm thinker than you tall I am!

A Buddha
One of the many Buddha's at the huge temple in Puli.

Kenting
Ahh Kenting!