Fulong Beach

A pleasant note posted on the inside of a bathroom stall in Fulong. I did indeed leave with a smile.

A hot and sunny Saturday on an island… sounds like time for a trip to the beach! Before we left home I’d read that Fulong Beach is the nicest beach close to where we live in Taiwan, so on Saturday we woke up a little after 6:00 (gotta get over this jet lag!) headed to Taipei Main Station and bought round trip train tickets to Fulong. Buying them was the easy part… the tickets were printed entirely in Chinese (how rude for a Chinese speaking country!) with just a few random numbers listed on the tickets for us to speculate on what they meant. We got a worker to point us in the direction of the right platform to wait at, but since there were trains coming and going every few minutes we weren’t sure which one to get on. We eventually found an English guide booth on the platform and the guide told us our train was coming in 15 minutes and then kindly pointed us in the direction of the 7-11 for some breakfast.

It took just a little over an hour for us to get there, and after paying our $2 admission we crossed over a bridge and onto the beautiful beach. The beach was a little peninsula of golden sand in the Pacific Ocean and the water was warm and refreshing. The scenery was awesome, with lush green mountains and colorful temples in the distance. I can’t believe I live so close to this!

These guys were so greased up, and who can deny their awesomeness? Baywatch, eat your heart out.

Everyone was sitting on the muddy part of the sand where the tide would go in and out, which we didn’t understand because everyone knows laying in the sand is the best. Well, after we got out of the water we figured out why: the sand was scorching hot after a few hours in the sun. By lunch time we felt quite scorched ourselves, so we showered with some complementary soap (in showers sponsored by Dove) and walked towards the train station for some lunch at a small restaurant. I had a peppered beef with rice dish and Mel had honey pork with rice. Each came with some oniony meatball soups that were delicious. I have to say we’re really enjoying the food here and haven’t had a bad meal yet! In contrast, I recall my first meal in Korea was a chicken stirfry topped in a thick covering of quivering fish scales, and in Spain I somehow found myself with a tuna pizza. So far: Taiwan=win.

We took the train back into Taipei, which turned out to be a bit tricky thanks to some worker in Fulong telling us to switch trains in some place called Chi-du and then when we got off in Chi-du the workers there told us to quickly get back on the same train before it left. In Taipei, we spent the night in a really cheap DIVE motel called “Golden Dragon”, which we were happy to find had cable TV and A/C.

We were dead hot from our day in the sun so we napped the evening away until around 8:00 when we walked down to Dadaocheng Wharf and caught a nice view of the city on the water. We’d actually gone there to see a fireworks festival that we’d read about online but although there were loads of people there, there were no fireworks to be seen. I still have no idea what went wrong with that, because the next day we checked online and there was an article about the amazing fireworks that went off at 8:30. Someone’s playing a trick on the foreigners!

So, Fulong Beach was awesome. You can bet we’ll be back there… but maybe we’ll wait until the heat dies down a bit in November. You should see my lobsterific back… ouch.