KaoHsiung

Over the break I made several visits to KaoHsiung to visit Florence's sister and her husband. KaoHsiung is Taiwan's largest port with about 1.5 million residents. This make KaoHsiung almost twice as large as Tainan. The biggest difference for me was that the streets in KaoHsiung are much wider than those in Tainan. Tainan is the old capital of Taiwan and most of the roads were laid out before cars were invented. KaoHsiung as grown mostly since WWII so there was plenty of reason to make the roads wide.

This view is from a Fort on Salt Mountain on the coast. In the distance you can see the Tuntex Sky Tower. KaoHsiung is on the southern coast of Taiwan and exactly opposite Taipei in the north.

Being a port city it port city,

it has a lot of large ships in
the harbor. Everything from
oil transports, container
transports and fishing fleets.









But the coast line in the city has
a long island that is a park for
picnics, bicycles, ...
The park is a couple miles long.








 We took the Ferry from KaoHsiung to the island and did some good bicycling.

The Tuntex Sky Tower is kind of KaoHsiung's answer to Taipei's 101. The Tuntex has this distinctive design of space between two legs.

KaoHsiung also has a Metro Rapid Transit system just like Taipei(but unlike Tainan) This picture is from the Formosa Station of the MRT.

While I was there, KaoHsiung was celebrating the 30 year anniversary of the "Formosa Incident". On December 10th, 1979 there was a demostration in KaoHsiung(at this site) protesting that Taiwan was still under Martial Law and this was 35 years after WWII was over. Chiang Kai-Shek was still alive and Taiwan was under control of the KMT and Chiang used the powers of martial law to keep it that.

The leaders of the Formosa were sent to jail for years but eventually became the leaders of the DPP. The current mayor of KaoHsiung was arrested at that time and she spent 8 years in jail. KaoHsiung is a DPP stronghold, the Taiwanese Language, Hoklo, is spoken there probably more that Chinese.