En route to Keelung (Taipei), Taiwan. Arrive on 24-Feb.
Kaohsiung is a port city on the southwest coast of Taiwan. The city seems to be trying to become more than an industry/port city. We visited on a Saturday, so traffic was very manageable.
Taiwan is the first country I’ve visited on this cruise that has not overwhelmingly converted to the Latin alphabet – Bali and the Philippines both used their own languages, but wrote them using the western alphabet. As we drove thru Taiwan I saw over 90% Chinese characters, with some having English subtitles. The big exceptions are numbers – they are all Arabic.
The first thing I saw out my cabin was this cool building under construction. Our guide said it will be a local bank.
We took a bus thru downtown and visited the Shoushan Park and the Dragon and Tiger pagoda. They are on Lotus Pond, as are many other temples/sights. For good luck you walk into the dragon’s mouth, climb steps up its pagoda, then down the pagoda, across to the tiger pagoda, up/down again, and out the tiger’s mouth. I guess I’ll only get 1/2 good luck.
I’m glad they kept the area directly around the pond public. As you crossed the bridge to the pagoda there was a dragon-turtle statue with sycee on its back (the oval things). These were the gold/silver ingots of imperial China – think the gold bricks in Fort Knox. The idea is if you rub money on the dragon’s sycee your fortune will increase. So, one of my fellow cruise guests rubbed his credit card. I’ll let you know how it worked out.
We then drove to the top of Shoushan Mountain, also called “Monkey Mountain”. The latter was a surprise to me, so I did not have a camera ready as we passed the monkeys on the road. We stopped at the Martyrs’ Shrine. There was a great view of the harbor from on top the mountain, including my ship.
We did all this in the tallest single-floor bus I’ve even been on. The bus had several TVs hanging from the ceiling, and we had to watch a safety video like on airlines, complete with highlights of actual “this is what could happen if you don’t wear your seat belt” video. I noticed a large leather-bound book in the overhead storage with over 300 plastic-protected pages.
It’s for karaoke. Seems some Asian cultures sing to each other on the bus as they travel from one tourist site to another.