Penghu and Qimei

Yini and I decided to make this weekend and long one and travel to the small island of Penghu. We both left work early on Thursday then headed to the airport and we arrived here in the evening. Our original plan was that we would go to the even smaller island Qimei today, spend the night there then come back to Penghu the morning after. However, when we learned that the weather forecast was promising high winds and rough seas for Saturday, which might cause the ferry service to stop, we had to change our plans. Instead we joined a one day tour to Qimei by speedboat.

Rumor had it that people often got seasick on those boats so we had prepared with anti seasick medicine but it turned out we didn’t need it. When we got there we rented a scooter and headed out on a quick round island drive, stopping whenever we saw something interesting.

The landscape is somewhat different from that of mainland Taiwan and there are several parts worth seeing, the most famous of which are the rock shaped like Taiwan and of course the double heart wier (a type of fish trap) which is featured on plenty of post cards and other promotional material.

At this point we had used up around half of our allotted time and still wanted to catch some lunch before getting back on the boat so we were in a bit of a hurry. On the way back however we came upon a big rusted processing plant of some kind and I just had to check it out.

Some pictures of the abandoned processing plant

It seemed to be rusted through and through so I dared not climb up but it was exciting none the less. Anyway, we did get our lunch, at a Vietnamese place which was good, and got to our boat in time. The speedboat then brought us to the next stop of the tour, an even smaller island called Wangan.

There we first visited a small village and strolled around among the old coral rock houses. Many of them were ruined which made it feel more special than of they had all been renovated. We then went down to sea turtle beach and spent the rest of the time relaxing there.

The speedboat then wisked us back to the main island and this time we got seats on the upper deck so we could get a better view of the islands we were passing.

Once back on Penghu we rented a scooter for the remainder of our stay then headed out to make use of the few hours of daylight we had left.

We first stopped at a kind of cave in the cliffs where the wind apparently makes a special sound, too bad there wasn’t any wind to speak of but the cliffs were pretty cool and I had fun climbing around on them.

With the last bit of sunlight disappearing quicky we then rushed to the other side of the island so we could see another small islett at low tide. This is a Mount Saint Michael type thing where a road of sorts is laid bare with the tide. Of course we had to walk out check out that little island.

It’s actually pretty cool, I guess this type of thing really resonates with me. When we were back on dry land it was getting pretty dark, so we called it a day.

I generally dislike tours, but this one was pretty good, especially considering that we might get stranded out there if we had decided to spend the night.