Every year in early April there are two national holidays back to back, Children’s Day & Tomb Sweeping Day. As you can imagine one is spent with families and the other is when families return to their ancestor’s grave sites and tidy them up by sweeping them. They also pray and make ritual offerings. All lovely traditions, no matter where you live, really. With the long national holiday break, there’s a spring break vibe in the air.
While we’re still living in Taiwan, we’re busy exploring new places at every opportunity. Orchid Island (also called Lanyu Island) was high on the list. Getting there is a long haul, so we made a 2 night stopover in Kenting.
1st Adventure: Kenting
2nd Adventure: Ferry from Kenting to Orchid Island
You may wonder why one would consider a ferry ride an “adventure” and let us tell you. First, it was 2.5 hours. Secondly, it’s notorious for causing sea sickness due to the currents in the south-east corner of the island. We took our sea sickness meds and held on for dear life with fastened seatbelts! Most passengers threw up and in the most polite way possible, quietly and in clear plastic bags. Taiwan is truly a magical place.
We may have gotten off easy on the seasickness, but our bikes did not fair so well. When we got off the boat we found that Pickles’ bike had a broken carbon frame. That took biking around Lanyu off our to-do list.
3rd Adventure: Orchid Island
Moving on from the bike debacle, we rented a scooter and zipped around the one road, all 17 square miles of it, exploring this beautiful remote island.
We stayed in a village called Iraraley which means “Polite People Village Name”. It’s the feature photo of this blog post and our AirB&B is between the purple and blue house, back out of sight.
There are a lot of farmers and fishermen here whose livelihood is based on flying fish (yes, they really do fly with wings) also wetland taro, yams, and millet. April is Flying Fish Festival which meant many parts of the ocean were off limits (protected) from diving and non-locals. Sadly, we didn’t see any of these swimming/airborne creatures.
Highly recommend visiting Orchid Island (a.k.a. Lanyu), on the edge of the Taiwanese world.
Love,
Pickles & Passionfruit
P.S. Fortunately, Taichung is a hub of bike manufactures and Pickle’s bike has since been repaired by a local carbon frame maker. He is back in the saddle.
If you want fresh blog posts zinged straight to your email then sign up and check your inbox for a confirmation: