Taiwan: Taipei, Tungshih, Taichung, Kenting
We went on a little detour to Taiwan to visit Jorunn and Molly's old friends as they lived there when they were younger. Taiwan was a bit of a strange place which I am not so sure I liked so much, but I still had a great time and met lot's of really nice people. We flew into Taipei to clouds and cool weather and took the bus south to Tungshih in the middle of Taiwan to visit the place where Jorunn and Molly grew up and lived for part of their 12 years there. We had a room in the back of a church which was rather nice, everyone wanted us to visit, everyone wanted to feed us and everyone wanted to take us around. We went to a park and just walked around in the area around Tungshih, which is close to nature areas. Our friends took us for a bicycle ride, quite funny since you could also rent electrical bikes, and we thought we were supposed to get som excercise?
It was strange and emotional for Jorunn to be back, even if she'd been there a couple of times since she moved back to Norway when she was 15. The country (and especially the food and the people) is great, but the missionairy stuff is another story for Jorunn... Also Jorunn's Mandarin Chinese isn't good enough to really communicate properly about anything interesting, very frustrating, especially since people are so friendly. So by the end of 5 days we were stuffed and ready to move on to something different, yes you guessed it was DIVING!
We travelled to the south to Kenting where we did some diving, relaxed in the sun and just had a nice time after all the socializing. We stayed with our dive guide John who took care of us all the time, drove us around, had dinner with us and drank with us. We dived the following sites: Flower garden, Sail rock (Sinking Nixon), Sand island, and San hai. There was not a lot to see, as there is a lot of fishing in the area, but it has gotten better after they made it into a marine park and there is less fishing. The visibility was OK and there were fish and nudibranch but not in great numbers. Sadly we did not have time to go to Green island where there is supposed to be really good diving but it was still interesting and fun. Also the beaches in Kenting were almost empty during the week days, very lovely for us. Before we headed off again we stopped in at the aquarium, the was very interesting even if we do not like to see fish and especially whale sharks in tanks it did help to educate the locals about the ocean and the to take care of it. Hopefully less people will be buying shark fin soup after they see how great the whale sharks are!! Soon it was time to head back to the Philippines so we spent a cold night in Taipei before our flight.
Interesting story from the backpacker place in Taipei: We met some younger American guys who were out partying all the time and the morning we were leaving one of the guys told us why they were there. Story goes that he had been working in Korea teaching English and making good money but he did not really like the place where he was working so he thought he would try Taiwan. Soon he found out that the money wasn't good enough for him so he had been there for the last three months waiting for a job that would pay a high salary. The strange thing was that he had gotten some good offers, but not good enough, so until he got the job he wanted he just called his parents when he needed more money. Weird!
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