January 27, 2009

Food | Landscape | Taiwan | Vertical Panoramics

Kenting Taiwan. In January 2009 Liv and I travelled to Taiwan for Chinese New Year. Taiwan is her home country but it was the first I had been there and I fell in love with the country. Taiwan has a really diverse culture having being occupied by the Chinese, Japanese and Portugese. There’s also a large American influence with many American’s living and working in Taiwan as well as many American companies outsourcing work in Taiwan.

Kenting was one of the highlights of our trip. We travelling to Kenting right at the end of January (this post wasn’t included on the day we went there) and it was a great surprise. Kenting in January/February is around 30C and loads of people go surfing throughout the year here. It has a great mixture of temples, beaches but also really good night markets. One day I want to have a surfing mini like the one in the photo below and Kenting also has really awesome seafood.

Something that really made me laugh was what people were wearing. 30C is very hot by UK standards so I went to Kenting wearing not a lot of clothes yet all the locals were walking around with wooly hats and thick jackets. Even the resident dog at the hotel we stayed at was wearing a winter jacket yet there I am “Mr British guy” basking in the heat. I wonder how the locals would manage with the British winter?

The day after we arrived in Kenting we all went down to the beach and ate some incredibly tasty seafood. We then had a walk around and had a walk over some cliffs but I didn’t get round to photographing these. If I lived in Taiwan I would really want to rent or own a property in Kenting as it’s relatively cheap but offers amazing weather and great food.

Hope you like the photos below…

Surf mini. This car is awesome, I really want to own something like this in the future.

Temple in Kenting Taiwan. This is a fairly new temple

Taiwan is famous for it’s seafood with it being a tropical island. We ate at a restaurant on a beach and this pot washer (who incidentally has the best job in the world) was located on the far end of our restaurant and the fishing boats pictured above were about 50 metres on the other side. Suffice to say the fish is really tasty and caught just before your meal fresh.

The above are deep fried squid balls. I have a problem when I see my food with more than four legs but when they’re deep fried like this I don’t care. These squid balls are divine.

Chinese / Taiwanese bun. These aren’t char sui in case you’re wondering but they’re utterly gorgeous.

Camper van Taiwanese style. We did a lot of travelling around Taiwan and saw loads of camper vans. Taiwanese people love their Volkswagen T1’s, T2’s etc but the van above sums up Kenting for me.

I really like the murial above as it’s really colourful and painted really well but also because of the flaked out dog. Kenting was about 25-30C when we were there (was snowing back in Edinburgh at this time) so as you can imagine life is really nice there.

Taiwan and especially Kenting have really amazing weather so everywhere you go there are flowers. We stopped at a temple and there was a field there will some really beautiful flowers. I’m not a flower person at all but Liv loves them so we took these photos.

The above two photos are from a shop that sells chandeliers and other hanging items made entirely from seashells. We bought two chandeliers and may look at selling some of these in the UK but they’re put together really well.

Hotel California, Kenting, Taiwan. Great name and very typical of Kenting

White Sandy Beach. This bar looks great but sadly we didn’t go in as we were with Liv’s parents. Next time in Taiwan I want to do a pub crawl.

Sandals. Lots of colours, loads of patterns, great. Everyone I met in Taiwan seems to wear sandals at some point which I’m guessing is because of the weather. Personally I hate wearing sandals, they don’t look good on me and I find them really uncomfortable but each to their own

McDonalds and night market. Taiwan has dozens if not hundreds of night markets where one can shop anytime of the day and buy anything from clothes to food to whatever. While this market isn’t as impressive as some of the Taipei night markets it did have some interesting looking food and goods.