We had our Memorial Day holiday on Tuesday, cancelling classes for both Monday and Tuesday. My professor for my Wednesday class was in a conference that day so no class for me on Wednesday as well. Seeing as how we only have so many vacation days this semester, I organized a group to go on a long weekend vaycay and we decided to go to Kenting. It's located on the southern tip of Taiwan and is known for its beaches and nice weather compared to Taipei. We booked our bus tickets and were on our way to Kenting at 10:30 Friday night. Our bus terminated at Kaoshuing, so we took a taxi from Kaoshuing to Kenting and we arrived there at approximately 4:30 AM. Seeing as how everything was closed, we hung out on the patio of a 7-11 until 6 AM, when McDonald's opened.
After breakfast, we dropped our stuff off at our hostel and we rented bikes to go to Baisha Bay, a beach about 10 km from Kenting. Now, most of you know that I am not a very cardio-athletic person, but I would usually "bike" about 5-8 miles whenever I go to the gym. Thinking that the 10 km ride would amount to less than 10 miles, I decided to go along with this idea. However, I didn't realize that a majority of the ride was uphill... along the mountains. So the bike ride took us about 2 hours. As exhausting as that was...
The next day, two guys from another group from I-House joined us and we all went to Chuhuo thinking that we were going to see an inactive volcano and ended up with us making popcorn over what were actually natural gas fires.
Later on, we went to an indoor waterpark that was a 15 minute walk from the hostel. Surprisingly, it ended up being a lot more fun than any of us expected. It was pretty empty save for a few families so we didn't really feel like the creepy 20-somethings swimming with 5 year olds lol. There was a lazy river that we all had a lot of fun with, a tidal wave pool that the lifeguard decided to randomly pour "rain" on, a nice big hot tub, and a bunch of water slides. Now, for those of you that know me well, you know that I am pretty accident-prone. Well I went on a slide with the big inner tubes and I'm sure you can guess what happened. The tube rounded a corner too fast and ended up slipping out from under me. I slammed my head against the botton of the slide, leaving quite a huge bump on my head. After we determined that I hadn't gotten a concussion, we all went about our business. After the water park, we went back to the hostel, showered, and got dressed. We met up with another group of I-House students and we all ate at the night market then sat on the beach that night. We then went to a dance club and met some other Westerners and had a blast dancing.
Monday, we went to the Kenting Forest Recreation Area, and more specifically, Sheding Nature Park where we hiked a trail and ended up at this beautiful park where families were playing ball games, flying kites, and blowing bubbles. The trail itself went through some of the most gorgeous places that I've ever seen. At certain parts, you could see the mountains, forests and ocean in one shot. At the end of the trail, there was the Skyward Pavillion, which overlooked the natural part of the Kenting peninsula and oh my goodness, it's now one of my favorite places on earth. That evening, we all freshened up and went to a bowling alley/arcade about a 10 minutes' walk from the hostel. It somehow ended up being a France vs. USA battle and sadly, the French kicked our butts lol. That night, we shared our favorite parts of our adventure and we agreed that we definitely got our money's worth out of the trip.
Tuesday, half of the group left for the morning bus back to Taipei. The rest of us packed up and checked out of the hostel at 10. We then headed for a semi-private beach closer to the hostel where we enjoyed a good 15 minutes of nice weather before it started to rain. After trying to wait it out for about an hour and a half, we moved to a nearby Starbucks where, of course, the weather cleared up. Half of our remaining group remained inside while myself and a few others stayed outside to enjoy the last of the beautiful Kenting weather. We headed back to Taipei at approximately 4 PM and came back at around 1 AM.
After catching up on laundry and emails, a small group of us went to the Maokong Gondolas yesterday to take advantage of an unusually mild and sunny day. We waited for a gondola with a 'crystal' see-through floor and I'm glad we did. The view was breathtaking and you could see all of Taipei at the top of the mountain. At the top, we walked past dozens of tea houses and a temple or two.
Last night, some of the I-House needed to watch The Karate Kid for a class so it became movie night!
Now, it's back to classes and work. *sigh* Now its the long wait until Philippines in April :]
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