Kenting on a shoestring Part 2

For my birthday at the end of July, we decided to take a trip to a beach 3 hours away by scooter. This is the second half of the story.
After close to three hours on our scooters, with only a break for breakfast, our tooshies were so excited to find our favorite beach, Bai Xia Wan (White Sand Beach) and set up shop. Things had changed since we had been there 6 years before. I was prepared for it, luckily, since I have a recent edition of Lonely Planet that I have been scouring. But even being prepared, we were both still disappointed that we could no longer camp on our secret beach. It has been discovered and is becoming developed. So instead of setting up our tent right next to the ocean with no one else in sight, we had to pay money (only $3/night) to set it up in a camping ground. What a sad
difference! The Taiwanese love to camp on slabs of concrete, and though this wasn't paved, it felt about the same. Sad! But of course the kids were so pumped about camping! They kept making sure that we were going to stay there for three whole days! "We are going to sleep in the tent? Really! For three days?" And when we answered "yes", we were followed by loud screams of joy.




So for two days, we only did 4 things:
1.Wake up and get ants off of the food which we had purchased in town the night before for our breakfast, eat it, get our swimsuits on, rent an umbrella from the campground, and swim until 11:00.

Taiwanese love our girls. (The Taiwanese are just starting to like water. When we were here before, they were almost all afraid of it-I guess that's why we had beaches all to ourselves. But still it was rare to see any swimsuits.)

2. Find things to do in town until the sun was bearable (it was mid-90s plus humidity, which means it felt over 110 degrees) after about 2:30.

After being VERY disappointed with the overpriced nasty western food in Kenting, we went to another nearby city and just went to the first noodle shop we found. Sophie made a new friend here! (The girls are wearing jackets not because it is cold, but to protect from the sun. Even the extra layer feels better than the sun scorching your skin and when you are on the scooter, it doesn't feel so hot)

These rides are everywhere in Taiwan. America banned them a long time ago for safety reasons, I think. Here are some outside a grocery store where we would pick up food for dinner and breakfast while we were killing time in the middle of the day.

We couldn't let the kids take naps in the hot tent, so they were pretty exhausted while we played around town.

Here are some 20-somethings that made the same scooter drive from the city that we did. They thought we were pretty cool to brave the trip with three kids, so we hung out together and ate at the nice, cool 7-11 together.
3. Head back to our beach and swim until the sun started to go down.



Euan and I hung out under the umbrella a lot. Even Sophie would hide away once in a while. But Meili wouldn't get away from the water the whole time.
4. Shower, eat dinner (corndogs, chicken nuggets) over the campgrounds bbq, and go to bed.

After two days Meili got a really bad sunburn, so we checked into a cheap homestay and we watched some TV and crashed until late afternoon.


Then we walked the now VERY touristy Kenting and shopped and had another horrible overpriced meal (bad luck!). The Taiwanese love Kenting after dark because the whole town is like one huge night shopping market. Scott and I took turns slipping down to the street for a peak after the kids were asleep.


So much fun for very little money! The 5 top adventures we had:
1. On the second night of camping, Scott and I woke up to an earthquake! It was a 5.5 that was centered just north of us! We were laying on the ground, and it sounded like a train was going through our campground. Scott said it was kind of nice because it rocked him back to sleep.
2. To take a ride on a scooter in nature is amazing. You really get a feel for your surroundings that you don't get in a car. You smell the jungle air, mixed with the salt from the ocean. It was so beautiful!

Me following the human GPS

For an hour of the trip the ocean is on one side and the jungle mountains are on the other. It is amazing. So are my skills at taking a picture while driving a scooter.
3. Even though we were disappointed that we couldn't camp on the beach, the kids still loved every minute of camping. And there were perks, too. We were the only ones, we got discounts on umbrellas and water toys, and we had free use of a fridge, toilet, showers, and BBQ.
4. One of the evenings as the owners were closing down the area and cleaning up, the girls and I walked into the toilet and there was a jungle spider that was bigger than my hand! I screamed and was so grateful that I had already learned the word for spider in Chinese from Meili's homework and the wife came to see and gasped, too and told her husband to come take care of it for us. EEEE! Then Scott told me the next morning that he had thought about leaving our screen doors open on our tent to try to keep a little cooler and he was so happy he didn't because he woke up in the middle of the night with the same kind of spider on one of our screen doors inches from his face! EEEE!

This isn't it (obviously), but we were happy to get a picture of one of the many creepy crawlies that we saw.
5. And of course the highlight of the trip was playing as a family at a fantastic BEACH!