Kenting & Orchid Island

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

Middle-aged man and beach breakdancers at Baishawan (White Sand Bay).
Lumi, a tasty cafe run by a Dutch woman, in the middle of no where = GEM!
Early morning sunrise ride to beat the heat
Passionfruit flower. Is this not the most beautiful blossom of all the fruits?
Dragon fruit farms, blooming, buzzing with honeybee pollinators. Fun Fact: Dragon fruit is a night blooming plant and the flowers last only ONE evening. We were biking VERY early in the morning which is how we caught them strutting their stuff. This fruit looks like the fire emoji.
Hengchun Night Market (en route to our favorite restaurant here, Kitchen Swell).

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.

Even though the ferry ride is well known to be rough, this is how we found our bikes “secured” by the crew.

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.

The Tao have a maritime culture which includes an essential boat building craftsmanship. These traditional boats are called tatala, and they are working boats for fishing!
The island should be called GOAT island because there far more of these than orchids.
The population is about 5,100 of which about 4,200 belong to the indigenous Tao people, some of which still live in traditional Tao underground dwellings. This was next to our AirB&B and was inhabited by a local grandma. These structures are perfectly suited for typhoons, but not backs and knees.
We had a wonderful tour of an underground Tao dwelling by Xi Nan Atone. In this culture women take on their first child’s name as their last name, so her first child’s name is Atone. That’s her dad in the background if you are wondering.
A local fruit called Pandanas (a.k.a. screwpine). It’s often juiced, tastes like pineapple lite.
The locals kids practiced their English repeating the phrase, “Are you OK?” They must have sensed our mental exhaustion communicating as older people mostly speak Tao, not Mandarin.

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.

The only flying fish we saw was this photo at this restaurant…
Second from left is Katherine, a Taipei local, working and learning about the Tao culture. She was our English translator for the Tao underground dwelling tour. We became fast friends, and she introduced us to her friends who served us flying fish rice dishes. All delicious!
Flying fish motifs are everywhere
The SCUBA diving around the island is some of the best in Taiwan. We did two shore dives with Daniel at Blue Ocean House Dive Resort. It was not exactly a warm day, but we did it anyway.
One road to the tippy top, looking south.
If it’s not a goat, it’s a pig.
Taro shaved ice w/ sleepy influencers. Taro looks like banana here, but the consistency is more potato like. Orchid’s taro has a satisfying chewiness that the mainland taro does not have.
We did a lot of goat gazing which is like birding but easier and more exciting with all the headbutting.

Highly recommend visiting Orchid Island (a.k.a. Lanyu), on the edge of the Taiwanese world.

pp
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.


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