After our five hour bike trip Saturday we scrapped our initial plan for Sunday, which was to go to the little island off the Kaohsiung coast called Shao Liuqiu. We've been there twice before and really enjoyed it but it takes some doing to get there - subway, taxi, ferry, renting bikes or scooters - and we were pretty spent after all the sun and heat the day before. Instead we went for a walk to refill the pantry with fruit - mango, pineapple, lychee, more mango, apples, bananas, cherry tomatoes, a couple more mango. By 11:00 we figured we really should get out of the apartment again and went back to Cijin to go for a swim.

The heat index was around 110 degrees but we were going to the beach. A place I normally associate with cooling off, but that's not really how it felt. The sand is black, so pity the poor soul who tries to walk across that with no shoes on. Fortunately my sandals didn't melt. The water was closed for swimming, a pretty common occurrence, but even the surfers were heeding the warning today. The waves were pretty big and the undertow was intense. Instead of swimming we just waded in. The water temperature felt only slightly lower than the air temperature but the breeze was nice.

I love any opportunity to get in the water so the trip was worthwhile but we didn't get to swim and we didn't cool off at all, but we did stop on the way home for mango ice, always a plus.