Meanwhile, Beth commented that you can't see the pics. I guess I should have explained that since I'm way behind on pics (since we can only upload pics using Paul's computer), I edited earlier blog posts, adding photos to the posts that actually describe what you're seeing in the photos. When I check the blog, it does show the photos. I hope you can see them too. Sorry - it may not have been as convenient for readers to add to earlier posts, but in the long run it should make a little more sense. Let me know if you find the pics, Beth!! :-) It took a very long time to add all the pics and captions, so it would be a bummer if you can't find them.
Paul has a really cool i-phone with some awesome aps, including one of our favorite board games, Settlers of Catan. Well, Tim, Michelle and Paul played a game on the train and another in the hotel room --- very fun!!! The four of us decided to eat at our hotel the first night, since it's a fresh seafood "mom & pop" joint at the beach, and it was a great decision!! We got to pick out our own fish on ice, with suggestions from the owner of the hotel/restaurant - a great guy who spoke really good English. We had two kinds of rice - with shrimp and their "little spicey" house special, some green veggie that was kind of like zucchini, orange chicken, and the fish we picked. Everything was delicious - all with chopsticks of course. We also had some Taiwanese beer - not bad. We poured it from bottles into cute little bitty glasses, so that was fun. The owner brought us a gift of lychees - a wonderful exotic fruit - after dinner. They are sold and served on the sticks they grow on (I'm pretty sure so they don't dry out at the spot where the stem would break off), and then you peel them with your fingers and eat them. They are about the size of a small plum, the skin is reddish in color and bumpy, but it peels easily. The fruit is white/colorless, and it's a lot like a peeled white grape in taste and texture. Very sweet and juicy!
Can't remember if I mentioned that our hotel was bright pink. Also it is right in front of a HUGE rock in the ocean (which tumbled down a hillside long ago and came to rest in the cove), which is often called Nixon rock because the sillhouette looks like his head/face/nose!! Our room was all decorated in blue - very spacious and nice room!!
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| Waves crashing on the rocks (Nixon in the back left) |
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| This was our "Chinese breakfast" at the hotel in Kending....Tim wasn't too excited about it! |
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| Our Chinese breakfast, and the patio outside |
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| Eating our sweet rolls from Seven-11 after the Chinese breakfast --- Tim was a happy camper! |
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| The view from the boardwalk during breakfast #2 |
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| Ocean view breakfast |
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| Beautiful morning!! |
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| Hotel lobby |
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| Alana in the lobby, ready to hit the beaches!! |
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| Ready for the beach! |
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| After the rain stopped, we headed to the nearest beach! |
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| The beach --- straight ahead! |
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| Ah yes, there it is, complete with palm trees! |
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| Tim immediately spotted a vacant hammock. |
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| .......and soon was relaxing in the shade! |
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| After about an hour, it got cloudy again, and rain was on its way. |
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| These little granite chairs along the boardwalk were all in the shape of frogs and birds! |
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| We tried the local ice cream - yummy!! |
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| It rained a little on the walk back from the beach, but after we put our umbrellas away, a double rainbow came out! |
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| The rainbow over the Nixon rock. |
Then we took a taxi into Kenting and actually sat in a McDonald's for a while to wait out the rain. It was 3-stories high, so we got a window table on the top floor, and again played a game of Settlers of Catan. When the rain stopped, we headed across the street to the beach where Tim immediately found a hammock in the shade, Alana laid out in the sun on the sand, and Paul and I headed for the water!! Well, let's just say the typhoon way out in the Pacific was already sending waves our way. The surf was awesome, and the waves were much too powerful for us to go swimming. We waded out and let some of the waves roll up to about our thighs, but the undertow was really scary and the waves too big for us to get in any farther. Tim joined us for a while too. After a while, we saw some more dark clouds rolling our way, so we quickly packed up and headed to a restaurant for lunch. It was a pizza place, and the pizzas were amazingly good. Tim also ordered a mango smoothy - very refreshing!! The rain let up quite a bit by the time we finished eating, but it was still sprinkling, so we just meandered up the street shopping. It was a resort/beach shopping district much like those in the US at tourist destinations, with many small shops, one right after the other, with beachwear, jewelry, souvenirs, sunglasses, flip-flops, etc., etc., etc. Except all the signs are in Chinese!! :-) We all made a few purchases, and really enjoyed the shopping expedition. Since it rains so much here, they have little umbrella holders by the doors of every shop, so you just set your wet umbrella down outside under the canopy or overhang, and when you come out, pick it up and head off.
Well, finally we got to the end of the shopping district, and went by another beach on the way to our hotel, just as the sun started peeking through the clouds and the rain stopped. We decided to go swim again. We rented chairs under a huge beach umbrella, and Tim stayed with our things since he had gotten enough sun already. This was a more protected cove, so the waves weren't quite so strong, and we did venture out. (Everyone else out beyond the breakers was in inner tubes except for us!! There was a roped off swimming area, and there were lifeguards, but the signs did say danger - high surf - no swimming!) The waves were still really big - some were about 8 feet high, but we didn't mess with the big ones - dove through them or rode over the top before they broke. We each got "rocked" a few times, and you really got churned and rolled pretty severely. Paul and I each got upended and slammed upside down into the sand, but we were just a little sore. Alana went back to join Tim reading books in the shade, while Paul and I continued body-surfing a while longer, trying to ride the waves and not get rocked again!! It really was fun, but it was a pretty big adrenaline rush seeing those big bad waves rollling in!!
The bad news from the weekend is that Paul lost his wedding ring in the surf. His ring has always been a little too big and slips off easily. When Paul, Alana and I were first out there, a big wave hit us and knocked us all over, and as Paul was reaching back to brace himself, the wave ripped the ring right off his finger. We tried to look for it, but the waves were so strong, and the undertow was so powerful, that there's no way we could find it. We left the hotel's card with the lifeguards and my email address with the hotel, but they all just kept shaking their heads saying "in ocean", while waving their hands far off in the distance. As Paul and Alana said, it's just a "thing", but it is sad to lose the ring just the same. So now it's somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. :-( The funny thing was, while we were shopping (before the ring was lost), Tim had noticed some inexpensive rings that looked a lot like Paul's, and he had commented that he really liked them. So today, we went back and bought one of those, just as a temporary replacement. It's at least similar, though not valuable, and this one fits snugly!! And as they said, at least it wasn't Alana's diamond that was lost!!! Yikes!!
We decided to walk back to our hotel, since there weren't any taxis around, and the sign said it was only 2 km to the big rock. Well, we think it was a lot farther than that - a long walk - but no problem after all the hiking we had done last weekend!! We showered and cleaned up, rested our sore bodies a little, and went to supper at the hotel since it was raining again, and we didn't want to head out with umbrellas. Dinner was just as good this time with a different fish choice and stir-fry shrimp plus the rice dishes. (The fish each night was a BIG one that we all shared - again everything was served family style.) This time we shared a bottle of wine too. We all headed to bed early so we could get up really early in the morning to head to the beach again.
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| In front of our hotel |
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| In the lobby waiting for dinner, drinking ice teas. |
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| Some of our dinner --- fried rice with shrimp, stir-fry shrimp with eggs, and spicy fried rice. |
| The towels in our room had the little lizards - just like the real one we saw! |
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| The bathroom door had these pretty, translucent tiles. |
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| I made Tim post with me next to the double fishes!! Should have been doing "fish lips"!! :-) |
Well, it stormed and rained and the wind blew all night long, and it continued until about 9:00 in the morning, so we didn't get to go to the beach. We could tell from our window that the ocean was really churned up - much higher waves then yesterday - so no way were we getting in to swim!! Tim and I did go for a walk during a lull in the action, and it was impressive to see the sea so active. We had a taxi take us into town at check-out time at 11:00, where we did the rest of our shopping, mainly Paul's ring purchase. We had lunch at a wonderful buffet restaurant. The guys had steaks and the gals had pork chops (you ordered the meat, then everything else was buffet), and the food was really good. But the big draw was the fruit --- lots and lots of kinds of delicious fruit!! Yum!! And there were 6 kinds of ice cream - between us we tried them all!! I had vanilla, mango, and pear ---WOW!!
I'll have to finish later - it's getting late. There's definitely more to today's story!!
Love,
-M-
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