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Green Island is one of the most visited holiday islands of Taiwan. You won’t see a lot of foreigners there, as you won’t see them a lot in other parts of Taiwan. It is a great experience to see how the average Taiwanese is using his or her holiday time. Most people in Taiwan are not entitled to a lot of holidays, so they want to spend the days that they have, as efficient as possible. That means short and intensive trips to all corners of Taiwan, often in the companionship of fellow travellers. This is also observable on Green Island. Most Taiwanese visit this little island as a daytrip, but that doesn’t really justify the island. The visitors haven’t a lot of hours to spend on the island because the first boat arrives at 11.30 am, while the last boat leaves already at 4.30 pm. But that doesn’t spoil the fun for most Taiwanese tourists. They spend their time on the island as efficient as possible by renting a scooter and zooming from highlight to highlight. A lot of time to experience the beautiful environment by doing a hike, or to enjoy a nice juice on one of the terrace, isn’t available. If you want to visit the island, plan to spend at least a couple of days because it gives you also the opportunity to visit the beautiful salt water hot spring, one of the absolute highlights of the island.

After our visit to Green Island, off the east coast of Taiwan, we crossed the country to the west coast to visit the cities Kaohsiung and Tainan. This stretch is normally done by train, but because of the result of typhoon Marakot, a part of the stretch was temporarily unusable. For that reason we took the bus from the city of Taitung to Kaohsiung. Both Kaohsiung and Tainan are nice cities, but not very special. The cities are modern and busy, but have some temples that are worth while a visit. And of course, as in other parts of Taiwan, the people are very friendly and enjoyable. The next thing we wanted to do is to bring a visit the Alishan region, in the mountainous heart of the country. However, when we arrived in Chiayi to take the small mountain train to the Alishan region, people of the visitor centre told us that it was not advisable to go there because of the impact of the Marakot typhoon. The road was heavily damaged and the train was temporarily out of order. After this disappointment we decided to travel back to Taipei because we wanted to do some more daytrips in the northern part of the country. The next day we went to Taipei’s zoo. The weather was still beautiful, but when we saw the weather news in the evening on BBC, we were told that a new typhoon was developing hundreds of kilometres east of the Philippines, the country that was hit a week earlier by the devastating typhoon Ketsana. More than 600 people lost their lives. When the BBC also told us that the new typhoon, named Parma, was expected to graze the northern part of the Philippines and than to head to Taiwan, we had a dilemma.