Taiwan cycle, Day 2

Chaozhou to Kenting

This day was going to be a much simpler journey as we just had to follow the one road all the way to Kenting.
We set off quite early in order to take advantage of the cooler morning temperatures.








As we cycled towards Kenting, each town we passed produced/sold a local product that is best suited for the area. There is the onion town, water caltrop town, squid town and in the photo below you can see hundreds of wax apple trees. Each town has many stalls each selling the same produce, so it's hard to imagine that people make a profit when the other twenty people next to you are all selling the same food.








By the time it was midday, the roads were much emptier as people were hiding from the sun. We also felt that was a good idea as the heat had become unbearable. The county of Pingdong is well known as being the hottest and sunniest in Taiwan, the winters are quite mild here and its pretty much possible to swim all year round.
We found a nice spot near a hotel that was along the beach to hide out in.








The nearer we got to Kenting, the smaller the mountains became and the closer the road got to the sea. We took a few breaks were we could find shelter as although the worst of the sun was gone, it was still pretty hot.



When we arrived into Kenting, I was approached by a woman on a scooter who offered a 'very beautiful room'. At first I just told her no thanks as Kenting is full of hotels so it is always a good idea to just go from hotel to hotel and check out the prices, plus, I wasn't in the mood to be pressured into a room. However, she approached me again and really emphasised that the room was 'very beautiful'. So i caved in and followed her.
Well, when we entered the room we were all pleasantly surprised, the room was amazing, three large beds, a wide screen plasma TV, they allowed us to put our bikes in the room, and they even washed our clothes, all for the bargain price of $1,200 or $400 a person (that's £8 a person!). Bargain!! A few days later and we would have had to pay around $7000 (around £140 in total!)

After showering and relaxing for a bit, we headed out to join the throngs of people that were slowly walking up and down the high-street looking at the night market. We had no plan to do the same, we were hungry! We headed into a very nice Thai restaurant and feasted ourselves till we couldn't eat any more. Once we had our fill, we began to browse the stalls until we had enough and sleep began to take over.