Photo16_13A.jpg

Photo16_13A.jpg
Originally uploaded by jono1515.

This is our picnic table at the campground we stayed at in Kenting. We took an overnight bus Thursday night and got down to Kenting around 7am. That's Elijah on the left and Amanda and Jess on the right, Jess is the blurier one. There were 11 of us travelling together at the start. We rented a huge van when we got there. I brought my surfboard along because I didn't want to have to rent one after spending $5000nt on mine and also because I'm starting to get a feel for my own board and I don't want to be jumping around from board to board while I'm learning. I ended up only surfing once, but it was still worth the hassle of lugging my board all over to have been able to use my own.
The day we arrived, we basically just hung out at the beach right by our campground. It was a really nice beach, coral sand. The beach is at the back of a bay and the sides of the bay are coral reefs. There was some coral at the back of the bay, but it was mostly out on the sides. The campground had a little food/drinks shack which was pretty sweet. I liked the food, though I'm pretty sure no one else in our group did.
On the second day we went to a beach over on the East coast of Taiwan, we drove around the southern tip and up the coast. The waves at this beach were crazy, I've never surfed in such big waves before. The bottom was pretty rocky too, so it was a pretty scary experience. You really had to paddle hard to get out into deep enough water, and then when you got there you were exhausted. And that was usually right when huge waves would come in and break on you. By huge, I mean like 15ft. I got tossed around pretty good and the only analogy I can think of is to imagine being in a front load washer machine. I did manage to stand up and ride one wave though, and for the first time ever, one of my friends actually saw me. He said something like, "I thought I saw you riding a wave and then I was like, no it couldn't have been because it looked like you knew what you were doing, but then I was like that's Jon's purple board and those are definitely his red board shorts" So if you don't believe me, talk to Elijah.
The next day we went up in to Kenting National Park and walked around up there. It was pretty sweet, there were some really nice views and a few caves that we walked through. One of the caves had a bunch of bats sleeping on the ceiling, it was crazy. After that we went back to the campground and the beach there for the rest of the evening. A few people left early on Sunday and we were down to 7 people. Sunday night Elijah took off and left me as the only guy with 5 girls.
On Monday we packed up and returned our rental van and hopped on a bus to Fangliao where we caught a train to Taitung.