Elections

It is amazing what they'll do to get elected. The elections aren't until December but the local KMT mayoral candidate is already out on his oil drum waving at cars. That's a particularly polluted junction which is always very busy. He spent hours waving at the passing cars.

Funeral!!

My journey to work this morning was delayed by a funeral procession. I managed to get past them eventually on the scooter and stopped to take a few photos. Not the usual line of black hearses as you would find in the west!

Typhoon

As you'll have seen from the news a severe typhoon hit Taiwan recently, causing a lot of death and destruction in the south of the island.

The north of the island was relatively unscathed, in Zhongli we had a lot of rain and some high winds for a while but nothing compared to further south. The high speed railway stopped operating for one day as a consequence of the bad weather. Video taken out of the apartment window.

Green Island

Last weekend I went down to Green Island off the south east coast of Taiwan. I flew down from Songshan Domestic Airport to Taitung and then took the choppy 50 minute catamaran journey across to the island. The last time Joanne and I were there it was in the winter (February), at that time of year there were hardly any tourists on the island. In August the place was crowded.

In February we had seen thousands of scooters parked up by the port, last weekend they were all rented out and were being driving on the 19 km road around the island.

I had an introduction to scuba diving in the beautiful crystal clear waters by www.greenislandadventures.com.

Although enjoyable, I opted to stick to snorkelling, the view of the reef and tropical fish is almost as good and the risks, should anything go wrong, are a lot less.

The weather was incredibly hot, the sun beat down mercilessly all day. On Saturday I neglected to put any sunblock on my shoulders and got a very bad sunburn, you just don't feel the sun when you're on the water surface. There have been a number of painful nights since then but thankfully the skin is slowly recovering.