Christmas fell on a Tuesday this year and our wonderful boss gave everyone a four day holiday! Christmas is NOT a national holiday in Taiwan, so most people do not get this day off. Everyone did get a 4 day weekend for New Years, which is a national holiday. But it came with a catch. Here in Taiwan if schools or companies give a four day weekend for a single national holiday, everyone has to make up the extra vacation day the week before, on Saturday. Yep. Weird. But that’s how they do it. So not only was Christmas weekend not a holiday weekend, most people had to work on Saturday.
But not us! So we figured we better take advantage of our good fortune by finally making it to Taiwan’s most popular beach playground – Kenting. And we were so glad we did!
Here’s how we made the trip happen
Getting There:
-> Taipei to Kaoshiung
From Taipei we took an hour and half HSR (high spead rail) train down to Kaoshiung’s Zuoying Station. FYI, some train routes from Taipei to Zuoying take longer. We had checked the HSR website and planned our trip around the express trains. We had planned to buy tickets online so our seats would be guaranteed but didn’t get around to it soon enough. By Thursday, all of the tickets for Saturday were already booked.
Instead, we simply went to the HSR station that day and bought non-reserved tickets. Non-reserved tickets do not specify a specific seat, just your destination. So with it you can board any train headed for that station that day. Cars 10 – 12 are for non-reserved ticket holders. None of the seats in these cars are reservable – so it’s first come first serve. Pro tip – you’re best chance of getting a seat is to board at Nangang, not Taipei Main Station! We took the blue line MRT to Nangang, and were rewarded with a comfortable seats for the entire ride.
-> Kaoshiung to Kenting
Originally we had planned to take the bus from Kaoshiung to Kenting. I had read some blog posts that said this would take about an hour and half. But when we looked into it further, we found the quickest bus we could find cost approx $350NT per person and would take about 3 hours (although it might have been closer to 2 1/2 hours had we only been going to Hengchun). Another option was a shuttle service to the hotel. It cost $400NT a person and advertised a two hour trip from the train station.
As we got further into the trip planning, it began to dawn on us just how huge the Kenting area is. If we really wanted to see more than a tiny section of it we’d either end up paying a lot of money in taxis or need our own vehicle (car or scooter). So we decided to save the $800 NT per person on round trip travel from Kaohsiung and instead put it into a rental car. At first we attempted to rent from Avis but after confirming our reservation, the next day the local office contacted us to say that actually they didn’t have anything available after all. 🙁 But our Taiwanese coworker who was traveling with us came to the rescue and found an even better deal with Carplus – who thankfully still had a car available for pick up at Zuoying station the very next day! In the end it ended up costing $5,800NT for three full days of rental, about $60US per day.
-> Getting around Kenting
Getting a rental car was BY FAR the best decision we made! You won’t find a lot of buses in Kenting, and maybe because it was the low season, we didn’t see many taxis either. So having a car made spontaneous changes to our plans due to weather or whim MUCH easier. While I’m sure zooming around on a scooter is great fun in the summer, Kenting can have crazy strong winds in the winter! Fighting those winds would have been miserable on a bike. Instead, we cruised with the car from one scenic outlook to another, laughed and shrieked at the crazy wind, admired the huge crashing waves and then jumped back in the car to the next outlook, coffee shop, or beach.
We did not rent a GPS, but we did bring a car USB charger to keep our phones charged. That ended up being a good thing. If you don’t have one, some convenience stores have one in their electronics section. Pauline and I have prepaid data plans, but there are some great tourist sim plans. We didn’t have any trouble with using google maps, which was good. The freeway only gets you about 30 minutes south of Kaoshiung, then it’s regular two lane roads down to Kenting. Along the way, we saw a lot of fruit stands, and dinosaur statues, for some reason. Southern Taiwan grows a lot of tropical fruit. One local specialty is the wax apple, which you absolutely must try. Not so much with the dinosaur thing. It’s similar to what you would expect to find in the Midwest of the US in areas with a lot of fossils. As far as we know, there are no fossils in southern Taiwan, so… another inscrutable Asian mystery, I guess.
Lodging:
Cheap lodging in cute hotels next to the beach were one of the things that initially lured us to Kenting. Again, we took advantage of the low season and found lots of lovely little boutique hotels near available for $60 per night or less. Our choice was a hotel within Kenting park on the eastern peninsula (Kenting is essentially made up of two mini peninsulas at the southern tip of Taiwan) right across form Sail rock and a few minutes drive from the Eluanbi lighthouse.