Day 12: Kending National Park
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I reserved one day to see Kending National park, and I really could of used more. There is only so much you can squeeze in a trip though. A view of the park from near my hotel…
The national park encompasses a fairly large area, and you really need some sort of transport to see it. Most people rent a scooter, but I still had my rental bike. Quite close to my hotel was the southern most tip of Taiwan, where there is a historical lighthouse and a park.
The southern most tip of Taiwan
The coastline is quite interesting, it’s very rocky with many natural caves.
View of the coast line from the park
After visiting the park, it was time to return my bike. Unfortunately the rental return location was in the middle of nowhere, 20KM from my hotel. I guess technically my cycle tour was actually 314+20=334KM. In the end it took about 1h10m to get down the place. After that, it was off to the National Museum of Marine Biology. All through Kending, near western prices are charged. For example, it cost $18 CDN to get into the museum. The exhibits however were excellent, so I’m not complaining.
The museum has the longest under water tunnel in Asia. Interestingly enough, as part of an exhibit on coral reefs they have an actual sunken ship in the aquarium to demonstrate man-made reefs. I have never seen anything quite like it at other large aquariums.
It’s an excellent place to visit, and I’m glad I stopped by. I wish I had a bit more time to see it, but due to the limited number of shuttle bus’s back to my hotel I was stuck cutting my visit a bit short. The aquarium had a section on the different types of oceans, and of course they had penguins. The snow made me think of home…
After the aquarium, I headed to the main Kending street for dinner. The main street can almost be compared to a smaller version of the Vegas strip, its extremly crowded and pretty soulless, but it has a decent selection of restaurants at least. The one nice thing about being in the tropics, is coconut water is available everywhere cheaply. It’s especially nice right out of the coconut.
After dinner, I managed to catch the last bit of the sunset.
Tomorrow it’s back to Taipei.