Keeping it Kaohsiung – Day 4: Trip to Anping

So here we go with our first off two day trips to Tainan. For the sake of convenience, we did consider just having an overnight stay. However, with the right train, it’s like 30-60 minutes and the tickets are quite cheap. So it just made more sense to turn this into two individual day trips.

For this one, we aren’t going to be in the main part of Tainan city, instead we are going to be out in the Anping District. The more central Tainan day is due to be tomorrow.

To make sure the itinerary worked, we got a train just after 9 am from Kaohsiung main station. Interesting fact, nothing edible was open at the station when we were getting the train. They just open later, except for the convenience stores. There is even a bento place here which we weren’t able to try. Maybe tomorrow we’ll take a later train.

Once in Tainan, we took a bus out to an old fort called the Eternal Golden Castle. We found out the night before that it was under renovation, but this still worked as a starting point… even if the front was mostly cordoned off by the construction work. Oh well.

From here, we traced the coastline north through the different parks to end up in Anping itself. On the way, you can see some nice statues including one of Mazu and a really cool whale. Also walked by an old war boat that they had placed some Transformers on. Taiwan really seems to enjoy Transformers.

Once in Anping, we had a peek in on the Anping Guanyin temple, which is fairly small, before going to the big temple in the old town – Anping Kaitai Tianhou. At this point, we came to realise that this must be one of those days where a bunch of schools get to take their students on trips. I’d almost think this was a Good Friday thing… but this isn’t exactly a Christian country.

After the temple, we wandered the streets of Old Anping to do some shopping and maybe get a small bite to eat. I had two things to look for whilst here and managed to get both. First was shrimp crackers, which are so ubiquitous that we got to try them as a free sample. The other thing was coffin toast – think a coffin made out of fried bread which is then filled with corn and other vegetables before spooning in a thick fish soup. It was delicious and I wish I had bought two for myself.

Next on the list was Anping Old Fort aka Fort Zeelandia. The original fort was built by the Dutch when they came to Taiwan as part of their wider colonial trading network. What remains of the original fort is just two walls. The rest is mostly of Chinese or Japanese construction as the fort changed hands multiple times.

Of the additions, the tower is by far the best and I can see how this has become a bit of an icon for the area. We didn’t go up because it was hot and, honestly, I wasn’t too sure if Anping from above was going to give the best photos. Overall, this is an interesting thing to see – but it was a bit strange how much they made of the Dutch when so little of the original structure is left.

They even sell potato snacks using edits of classic Dutch paintings!

Our last site in Anping was the one we were most looking forward to: the Anping Tree House. On paper, this is a bit of a weird thing to preserve as a tourist attraction, an old storehouse that has been overtaken by local banyan trees – but this is just such a weird and cool place to walk around. There’s a reason that this is one of those things in Taiwan that a lot of ‘influencers’ will get photographed in.

To get the rest of this day to work, we needed to start using some local taxi apps. The buses can be super infrequent and even when they are running, they turn a 10 minute drive into an hour where you have to change buses. For two people, it just made sense to do this.

So that’s how we got to Sicao for the Green Tunnel boat ride. Sicao is within the Taijiang National Park, the home of a wide area of mangrove forests and wetlands. This boat ride takes half an hour and takes you through some mangrove areas and through a green tunnel of overhanging trees. Okay so the tunnel isn’t 100% natural, but the little crabs and the egret we saw were. It was just a lovely way to spend a half hour, especially as we all kept having to duck for some of the extremely low hanging branches.

Following this, we popper into another taxi to the Luerman Temple. Temples have been there for centuries, but when the current complex was completed, it was the largest religious complex in East Asia. It must also have some of the largest guardian deity statues in the world as those two gentlemen were massive.

The temple complex itself is like a warren of altars and incense. Also it’s basically a Taiwanese super church. The amount of money poured into construction and maintenance of the complex must be massive. Of the whole complex, I developed a soft spot for the building at the back that was devoted to those praying for love. It was three floors tall and the walls of the stairways were decorated with the photos and wedding invites of those who found love. Some of these photos were so old that they’d been sun bleached to white in the following years.

In the car park on the way out, we saw the second of two mini processions (the first was when we were waiting for the bus to get us to the Eternal Golden Castle). This second one, however, had the soundtrack of a whole bunch of firecrackers. Given how many of those involved were teen boys, and there was a fair bit of instruction involved, it almost looked like a bit of a rehearsal. It’s Children’s Day soon… so maybe it’s related to that.

Finished off at the Wusheng Night Market. This might be the last night market of the trip depending on how long it takes us to get through our list of things to do on our second Tainan day. We’d barely eaten today so was ravenous, it was early so most of the stalls were still setting up when we arrived. The highlights of this particular food haul ended up being a curried chicken kebab roll, a Korean style pork wrap and some fried pork dumplings. I was hoping the takoyaki stall would have finished setting up before I got full, but alas that wasn’t to be.

Tomorrow is the last full day of our holiday and we will be looking at some more things in central Tainan. It’s a return to the very hot temperatures and sun, so hopefully some of these places will have air conditioning for me to escape into.