#kaohsuing

I have embarrassingly little in my travel journal for this day— one page, that literally reads “I’M GOING TO RIDE. I RODE, 125KM. YES.”

City-riding today! Which is exciting, because your chances of dying go up exponentially, hahah! So many cars, so many scooters, so many pedestrians and OTHER BIKES. We ride for 125km, which is ridiculous, but I’m going to tell you something: I rode the whole thing, and was feeling DAMN. GOOD. by the end. Hell yeah.

The colorful city death trap. God I love cities in Taiwan, they’re so vibrant and kind of ridiculous because there are half a million signs all in different colors so everything stands out so nothing stands out. You want to discover things? You gotta slow down yourself.

Bust stop! That’s cute.

Murder vehicle! Less cute. These things will run you over and yell at you for getting in their way later.

Even though it’s a city, Kaohsiung is still hopelessly entwined with nature. You can see moss growing on everything, cement cracking, vines twining around steel poles. And no one minds, really! There’s no aggressive maintenance of a pristine human facade here.

I like the little statues of Guanyin, the Bodhisattva of Mercy/Compassion, on the street corners. A bit tragic, because it probably means someone has died in a car accident there, but now there is a statue to protect the people (and, if you want a more practical effect, people don’t drive over the broad sidewalk with this in the way).

We arrived hella late in the evening. You think biking through the city is murder? Well, it is, but biking through the city AT NIGHT is against the Geneva Convention. But we survived!