Kenting

Kenting is on the southern tip of Taiwan, which the locals regard as being extremely hot. I've heard the counter-argument, however, that it gets a steady breeze from the sea, so it doesn't stagnate like Kaoshiung. The point was rather moot as we visited it in the dead of winter. It was a fairly remote place, as it was not connected to the train line. We had to overshoot Kenting and arrive in Kaoshiung, and take a bus thence to Kenting.

The bus ride itself was a bit unsettling. Most of the buses are rather cushy and many have several TV's, as in a plane, so that you can watch whatever screechy karaoke tape the bus driver has chosen. This time around, a movie was shown on the bus, and it didn't bode well. The first preview was for a movie we'd never heard of, which featured a man skirting the law after a brush with the criminal underworld, a love interest, and retribution. Then the feature presentation showed, called "The Contract," which was a movie about a man skirting the law after a brush with the criminal underworld, a love interest, and retribution. It was horrible B-movie stuff, and I was pretty embarassed to be sitting on the bus as a representative of the culture that spawned this drivel.

So I looked out at the window, and beheld one of Taiwan's natural treasures: the betel-nut girl. The betel-nut girl is typically a young, scantily clad young lass in something that resembles a glass display case, perhaps 4' x 4' x 6' in height. The frame of the case is highlit with colored flourescent lights, as if it were some sort of carnival case. Why hadn't I seen them in Taipei, you might ask? The government, apparently, takes exception to what the betel-nut girls stand for. Unfairly or no, they have been associated with a base form of prostitution, and they have been chased out of the cities and relegated to the hinterlands, the gray realms between cities, where truck drivers can get their fix and ogle the girls. The betel nut is apparently a very popular drug in Asia, which is something akin to chewing tobacco, though purists would probably chastise me for such an analogy. Habitual betel-nut chewers end up with red-stained teeth, which brings me to one of the more unpleasant side-effects of the drug: salivation. Chewing this substance opens the floodgates for the salivary glands, and the bright red effluvia can be spotted nearly everywhere, but more frequently at taxi-driver haunts and truck stops. The only picture I have of the whole betel-nut culture is the one to the right, which I think we took in Tainan. Since we were on a speeding bus, we never really got any good opportunities to get a shot of a betel-nut girl. I'd feel a bit odd doing it anyhow.

Well, 1.5 bad movies later, we arrived at Kenting late at night, and found another Christian hostel with fantastic amenities. After a labored dialogue with a man we found on the premises, an over-accomodating woman showed us to our room. The hostel was beautiful, with lacquered furniture and a gorgeous common room, complete with festive Christmas tree. The town itself, however, left some things to be desired. A huge caravan of kids had descended upon the town and were launching fireworks willy nilly, and I discovered to my dismay that the beautiful sandy beaches were... elsewhere. There was a nice 200-foot expanse, but that was about it. Even the pearl tea was sub-par, as the pearls were rubbery and overcooked.

The next day, however, we found some nice areas and got to meet some of the wildlife, like the friendly crab above. I got my father to pose for a picture, in which he demonstrates one of his broadest smiles. We also tried walking to the interesting hill you see in the background of the rightmost picture, and I think it can be done, but the signs deliberately thwarted us. We followed them to the gongyuan (park), yet we ended up along a rural road, passing the occasional rustic shack. It was a pleasant walk, actually... not many people took this road, and nobody drove down the unpaved section. Before the unpaved section, the occasional couples in cars would drive by, admiring the scenery and no doubt "getting away from it all." My father had read somewhere that the Taiwanese found these large stretches of grass to be pretty exotic. Maybe that was just a western author trying to make the Taiwanese seem more exotic; it was pretty to us, and we'd seen lots of grassy fields before.

Kenting had some beauty, but I think it was basically the gateway to much more beautiful parkland further to the southeast. Unfortunately, my father and I were not feeling terribly adventurous, nor had we slated much time for Kenting. It was a pleasant diversion, but it wasn't the best place to be. I had the dickens of a time finding a t-shirt there; instead they were selling shirts for Key West and Daytona Beach. Why would I travel 15 time zones to get a shirt intimating I had been to Key West?

To Tainan