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I booked a day off work, and me and Simon decided to treat ourself to a 3 day weekend in Green Island.  It’s a tiny island on the east coast of Taiwan, nearer to the equator than we are here, which meant it was lovely and warm :-)  By tiny I do mean pretty tiny - we could drive all the way around it on our scooter in about 30 minutes.

We got on an overnight coach late thursday night, which took us to the other side of the island.  Early morning, we boarded our ferry and the rocky seas and sounds of people throwing up wasn’t the best start to the day :-S However we made it safely and were shown to our temporary home.  It was beautiful.

Even though the island is small, there was loads to explore.  We went to see the lighthouse, and thinking we were walking a back way to it, ended up seeing it a lot closer than we were meant to - we got shouted at and had to leave.  Good old “I’m English and stupid” card! The whole island is made from volcanic rock, so some of the shapes of the rocks are pretty awesome, although they have names like “sleeping beauty” and “confucious” which you have to use your imagination A LOT to be able to see! We managed to find two caves that were tiny, but they were interesting to see.

One of the best things we did was go to the hot springs.  They are one of the only 3 naturally occurring salt water hot springs in the world.  Some of the pools were almost right in the sea, and because it was a friday, it was pretty empty.  Me and Si had our own private one, and we made the most of it by staying in there for 2 hours until the sun had gone down.

Another of the best things we did was snorkelling.  We went with a group of Taiwanese people, but quickly we were treated as individuals - the guide didn’t speak English so kind of left us to it - didn’t ask us to wear life jackets, or have to hold on the the group buoy the whole time.  Thank goodness! We went off and saw some amazing fish.  This was all right next to the shore.  The coral was so colourful too.  One fish bit my finger and it actually really hurt!

Talking of fish - the seafood served in the restaurants was very very tasty.  One evening we treated ourself to some, and then a group of Taiwanese people came in the same restaurant and insisted we tried everything they had bought too.  Unfortunately this also included drinking Kaoliang which tastes absolutely disgusting.

Green Island is famous for it’s prisons.  It has one on there now which is still active, and it also has another prison which was used for political prisons in the 1950s, until it closed in 1987.  We were allowed to look inside it, and it was eerie, seeing the cells and things. 

The middle of the island is mountainous and green, and again really beautiful.  One morning we got up ridiculouly early and watched the sunrise.  We also did a hike across the island. It was amazing because lizards kept running across our path, there were so so so many of them!  Unfortunately there were also spider webs crossing our path which we kept walking through.  What made this worse was that we saw a few of these spiders, and they were the biggest ugliest hariest spiders ever - bleurgh! Very scary.

On our last day, we got the ferry back, and then got the train all the way around the island back to our home.  This took about 6 hours, but at least it was daylight most of the time, so we got to see more of the island.

Good holiday

A few weekends ago 7 of us went off on our scooters, and camped at a place called Sun Moon Lake.  It’s a tourist attraction as it is the biggest lake in Taiwan.  It really is beautiful though.  We drove around it once or twice, looking at the scenery and temples.  One temple had a massive gong that you were allowed to whack, that was pretty fun.  Another was really tall and gave a stunning view of the lake.  We decided to avoid to campsites as they were full of taiwanese people, so we found our own campsite which was perfect - just us, a fire and right next to the lakeside.  Beautiful!