Advertisement
Published: October 24th 2013
After having a great buffet breakfast complete with an espresso machine that ground the beans as it went, we started to have second thoughts about leaving our favorite hotel of the trip-thanks for the memories Ing Wang hotel! But alas, we dragged ourselves away and hit the road. We had a good ride taking mostly provincial rd 17 which had a good wide shoulder much of the way as well as quite a bit of dedicated bike lane/paths. We strayed from the 17 and bypassed most of the busiest parts of Kaoshiung city and found some great bike paths along the Love river. We took things a little too slowly and easily and found that we might miss the 4pm ferry to Little Liuqiu Island. Kudos to Josee for some pretty steady 26-30km/hr(peaking at 35!) touring hustle with 75km on her legs at that point! We made it and had a really great ferry employee take us under his wing. He enjoyed practicing his English and made sure to take us personally through every step of the journey, even bringing us some sticky rice and beans wrapped in Banana leaf! After arriving, we looked around a bit before finding a very
nice B and B called 17 Bliss. They were very nice. They had virtually no English(about as much as our Mandarin) and as is the custom in many of the restaurants here handed us a menu (for the next day's breakfast) and a pencil to check off what you want. We didn't understand a thing on it but managed to communicate that we didn't want any meat so they checked off something for us! We were excited to find out what our mystery Brekkie would be! We found a good seafood restaurant by the harbour and hung out for a while with a nice couple(he was French, she was Taiwanese) from Kaoshiung who have recently opened a creperie there-the Taiwanese love their food and are apparently quite game to try new things! They were really nice and she insisted on making us a list in Chinese characters of must try foods that we could show to people! Our brekkie that next a.m turned out to be yummy ice coffees and egg and tuna sandwiches. They also included an electric scooter rental(the island has a neat network of charging stations)with the room so we spent the day scooting around checking out
the sites! We returned the scooter in the late afternoon and then decided to catch the sunset on the other side of the island so they gave us another one. Everything went well until we jumped back on after the sunset and the thing was almost dead. We decided to plug it in at a station just up the road and leave it plugged in for an hour. The problem is that these things take a long time to take a full charge. If someone is around at the charging station you can apparently ask for a new battery but it was pitch black and everyone had gone home for the day. Anyway, we decided to give it a go knowing that there were some downhills that we could coast down with the bike off and that there were a couple of charging stations along the way(they're on a map). Another challenge presented itself in that the lights and horn weren't working and it was quite a hilly narrow route and mostly unlit! Luckily the roads were mostly in excellent shape so there weren't too many unexpected bumps or potholes. Between coasting and one more short charge(the low charge warning
light and beep came on again) we made it back to town, plugged it in, and went off to a long(and excellent!) seafood dinner at the same place we'd eaten the night before then headed back to the hotel.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.135s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 5; qc: 46; dbt: 0.0924s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Lise A
non-member comment
Lovely
Hey, Thanks for the tidbits into your lives during this journey. It looks like you 2 are so relaxed and having a wonderful time. You put a smile on my face with each entree. I am happily jealous of this great adventure and look forward to hearing about it in person when you return. Be safe and soak it all in . Lise