The Other China – Taiwan Report – Part 2

I am not sure if I will ever come back to Taiwan (since I “must” go to at least one new country per year and am not in the habit of going anywhere twice unless I have a reason (business trip, knowing people there)) I wanted to make the most out of my short trip and see something more than only Taipei and thus ventured to the southern end of the island to the city of Kaohsiung … One of those million people cities no one has ever heard of (2.7 million!) … My main target in Kaohsiung was the Lotus Pond that has several temples and pagodas to offer (according to the internet).



I got up relatively early and headed to Taipei’s main station to catch a bullet train there.

The fastest version of them goes to Kaohsiung or rather Zuoying in 90 min. That’s how big the country is, it’s 300 km long and that’s it.

In Japan you pay roughly 10,000 yen one way from Tokyo to Nagoya, which is 300 km, in Taiwan you pay that for the round trip = it’s much cheaper than in Japan.

The Taiwanese bullet train is a Japanese export and a more or less exact copy of the thing. It’s so similar I was confused by the announcements in Mandarin

The weather was oppressively hot and dark and humid with heavy clouds when I left Taipei but became clearer if not less hot and oppressive the closer I came to Zuoying. Now, I don’t know what the story is with Zuoying and Kaohsiung but I could see no difference between the two cities, let’s say the bullet train brings you to Zuoying and you can take the metro then to Kaohsiung. Arrived there, I tried to find the lotus pond on the simple metro map, there are just two lines, red and orange, but was disappointed.

I had noticed a tourist info though and went there and the one lady who spoke English told me to take a bus and even wrote it down on a piece of paper. I am not too fond of riding buses in countries I don’t know and whose language I don’t speak and soon I knew again why.

Nobody waited at the bus stop in the heat and when my bus came with the number the lady had told me I was the only customer and of course the bus driver spoke no English. The bus drove then this way and that and hither and tither through partially not so attractive looking neighborhoods for 40 minutes before finally arriving at the bloody pond. On a map it had looked much closer than that. Okay, the bus cost only 12 dollars and in between some people boarded it and left again, but nevertheless I was not enthused and a little scared and uncomfortable.

Arrived at the Lotus pond I was in for another surprise. I had excepted old temples and stuff but… What awaited me was a plastic and papier-mâché wonderland. That sounds so negative though and I shall reformulate it like this.

The temples looked relatively recently built and I am not so sure about their religious significance, but they were all temples in action.

At the edge of the pond lay the “real” temples, and on the pond was the let me call it “amusement park” aspect of it.



Temple 1 – functioning, incense burning, people praying – opposite the dragon and tiger pagodas.



Huge temple number 2, with neon sign (even the Longshan temple in Taipei had that) and across from it the super dragon with the pagoda on the lake beyond it.



There were only two English signs at huge temple 2, “please come into the 3rd and 4th floor” and the sign for the rest rooms.

So, that’s what I did and ventured into the 3rd and 4th floor of huge temple 2. Laden with gold and red and dragons after dragons, I sneaked in my few pictures, not knowing whether I was allowed to take them or not.

I am well trained in temple watching and have seen more than I can count in Japan and also a few in China. But Taiwanese temples are exotic even to me. I do not know what kind of let me call it “loud” Buddhism this is, but I was quite touched by the seriousness I saw in the people who went praying in these temples.

Even inside this monstrous statue of temple number 3 was a priest and they sold incense and had books with sutras around.



I don’t know how that goes along with a fortune telling machine like we know them from a European fun fair next to it, but so be it.

A few meters on was another temple and I presume a new car blessing was going on. A car left the temple with fire crackers attached to it (in Japan you can have your new car blessed by a Shinto priest (so that you don’t have an accident), here the temple and the fire crackers served that purpose).

I walked around the entire pond in monstrous heat to find out that I had missed the most important “Confucian” temple when I was halfway at the starting point again and gave up going back to it, since it was too hot.

I had obtained a map meanwhile in the pond’s information center and the Zouying station from which I had started looked so damn close. I decided to try a taxi, held the map under the drivers nose and he drove me back to the station in a bloody five minutes for only a 100 dollars (that’s about 4 USD) instead of 40 minutes for 12 dollars. Well, you always know better once you’ve tried it out.

I still had some hours left until my train back to Taipei would leave and decided to seek some tranquility at the ocean, or so I thought.

I rode the subway to the last stop and wandered towards the water only to find myself in an insanely busy harbor with the impressive skyline of Kaohsiung and a Starbucks at the tip of a “park” (five trees, no cars for ten meters). Around the corner then the Taiwan Straight, which is busy like Tokyo bay with one giant ship lining up to the next out at the horizon and bus loads of tourists around me.





Well, but I have seen the Taiwan Straight now from the southern tip of Taiwan. I walked back to the subway station, and rode the long way back to Taipei and my hotel.

From the bullet train window, Taiwan looks much like Japan, by the way, or rather like it’s little southern brother. It’s after all 3000 km closer to the equator and respectively much hotter and even juicier and greener. I don’t know whether one can see Taiwan’s impressive mountains from the train in clear weather (the highest is 3900 meters high!) or whether one has to venture further inland for that but all in all it does remind me of Japan more than of China landscape-wise.

Here is the link to the full set of photos and I’ll upload part three of the report tomorrow.