Taipei, Taiwan

We arrived in the early morning.  We scanned around for free wifi from the ship but couldn’t get connected to anything.  We had breakfast, scanned again and found that a myriad of unsecured providers had appeared which we could get in to.  There followed a flurry of activity to update the blog and Facebook and we were doing well until suddenly they disappeared again.

We decided to go exploring in Keelung, the port where we had arrived (Taipei is 20+ miles away and we hadn’t booked any excursions).  We set off along the dockside as another large cruise ship arrived and moored up.  We found some wifi in the terminal building and thought we would come back later to see if we could update the blog further.

We set off to find some shops.  Well, there are no Meadowhalls here, just loads of small individual shop units on the many streets.  We decided we would look for the entrance ot the park on the hill which we could see clearly from the ship.  The heat was absolutely stifling and I could feel my clothing getting wet through with sweat when we were just walking along.  We did find the steps up to the park but they looked truly formidable, especially in the heat of the day so we looked into the very Chinese-looking building nearby.  Were we allowed in?  I was starting to look very much like a temple.

We got near the very open entrance doors to be greeted by a man in scout uniform who wanted to show us in the temple.  So it was a case of off with our shoes and in we went.  It was such a beautiful place and all set out for a wedding later that day.  Our guide told us that, if we came back later, chances were that the family would invite us to join the wedding party at this Buddhist wedding.  After a good look round we were invited up to their information centre where they had exquisite displays of all sorts of things, including artistic work carried out by prisoners in Taiwan.  The Buddhists do a lot of work with prisoners to try to get them to reform.  We left the air-conditioned calm of the Buddhist temple information centre to hit the hot streets again and we plodded our way back to the ship and an empty vessel!  So many were out on excursion and we were reminded that most of the tours today were full day trips, so calm and peace were likely to continue for some time yet.

After some rehydration it was time for a pizza and a quick dip in the pool – Graeme had managed to turn pink after drying out in the sun from swimming for only 20 minutes at 8 in the morning, so we were reminded that the sun is hot in these parts.