Kaohsiung reminds me a little of Taipei but smaller and with more water (since it is a coastal city). I really like the city.
We started our day, after eating breakfast at our Hotel which consisted of a Chinese buffet (rice, rice porridge, stir fried vegetables, fish, some kind of meat with vegetables, Chinese steamed buns or toast with very sweet jelly or peanut butter or some coconut spread) by walking toward love river right in the center of Kaohsiung.
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| Love river |
From there we made our way to the harbor. Pier 2, originally a warehouse site which is now an arts center, is really interesting and beautiful. You can see many pieces of art around the area.
In a nearby warehouse there seemed to be some kind of rock music festival, apparently the "Megaport Festival" (we could hear the rock bands playing across the bay on Cijin island).
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| Pier 2 |
From the port you can take the ferry to Cijin island, which costs 30 NTD, or 20 NTD when paying contactless, since you seem to always get a little discount that way. You can pay using your contactless public transport card. On Cijin island we visited the beach, ate some streetfood and went up to the lighthouse. There we noticed the influence of the british settlers, who build the lighthouse in 1883. We also saw some christian churches in Kaohsiung, also there due to the influence of the settlers.
We ate a massive shaved ice with frozen mango, mango and vanilla ice cream, some kind of panna cotta underneath and condensed milk on top which might have cost us more than normal, or it normally costs 200 NTD (we couldn't find any prices on the menu). As I said it was massive so maybe 200 NTD is the normal price.
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| Cijin |
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| The lighthouse |
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| it was the size of a small melon... |
Before going back to the mainland with the ferry we bought some takoyaki (grilled dough-balls with small octopus pieces inside) as a counter balance to all the sweet shaved ice earlier.
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| takoyaki |
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| at Starbucks |
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| Lotus Pond |
Although the lights at nighttime maybe a bit too tacky (most of them are very colorful), we really enjoyed the scenery at Lotus pond. When at the Dragon and Tiger pagodas be sure to enter through the dragon's mouth and exit through the tiger, but there also signs reminding you of that.
Since we saw that there was a direct bus back to our hotel we went through some small alleys to get to the bus station.
When going on a bus there are three possibilities on how/when you have to pay using contactless methods: either when getting on the bus (if you see this character: 上), getting off the bus (if you see this character: 下) or both (if you see both characters: 上下). If you pay in cash I assume it will always be when you get on, and be sure to have the exact amount, since no change is given. I would recommend using contactless cards since it's so much easier. Every time we went by bus so far we had to use the iPass when getting on (card reader next to the bus driver) and when getting off (card reader next to the door). The bus fare is subtracted from your card's value when entering and if it is a "normal" (shorter) trip, when getting off, the card reader will say "0 NTD", since no more than the normal bus fare is necessary, or, if it is a longer journey it will subtract a little more than the initial fare.
We were getting a little hungry at that point so we decided to get off the bus to go to Liuhe Nightmarket again for dinner.
We ate pretty much the same thing as the day before (taiwanese hot dog, fried chicken, papaya milk) but also tried some fried mushrooms, which were so good!
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| Fired mushrooms (King oyster mushrooms) |
Thank you for reading!
Pia
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