Day 5- Kaohsiung

From Tainan we took a train to the beautiful city of Kaohsiung. These two cities are both on the southwest coast, across from China with the Taiwan Strait between China and Taiwan. Kaohsiung is right on the water, making it very important for defense against China, and also very beautiful.

We took a less than five minute ferry to Cijin Island and spent the day there.  A large market by the shore for tourists saw selling lots of dried squid and other dried seafood snacks. All the sellers are selling the same thing! Literally almost all of the twenty plus stands in the hall were piles of dried seafood.

Look at all the dried squid!

More piles of dried squid!

We climbed to the top of a mountain on the island where the lighthouse was. Boy was it hot! I always thought Asians carrying around umbrellas in the sun was goofy, but now I understand that it is very necessary and have succumbed to the no-rain-Asian umbrella trend.  Here are my mom and sister tirelessly trudging up the mountain.

We made it to the top.

I swear this is candid!

The mountain was previously used as an army base, so there were a ton of old abandoned bunkers and stone tunnels in the mountain.  The tunnels were used to store military equipment such as cannons.  I was very curious about the tunnels and kept peeping into them, which really confused my relatives.  They kept telling me the view was on the other side.

Isn't this hole in the mountain neato?!

Absolutely NO striding allowed

Here's one last picture I took while we were walking around the island. It was so nice to have my cousins and aunt to show us around because they knew all the secret side roads.  Here is a house I thought was very quaint on a side road we took.  The owners still used wah, or old shingles to roof their home. Also the mopeds seemed quintessentially Asian.