We took our last fling to Kenting on the weekend. I say the last, although we still have a few weekends left and who knows what we may do. Well, there's the packing, closing the bank account, paying last bills, but we may find we have some time on our hands and find a way to get to the beach again. We'll see.

Anyway, here was our weekend.

We left straight from school and shared a taxi with another couple from KAS. A friend had organized the weekend and in all 17 people headed down. We were the first to arrive. The taxi driver was fast enough to get us there ahead of the Friday rush but slow enough to not be terrifying.

Kenting is a quintessential tourist town. Lots of surfers and beach bums, plus families from the city (it's about two hours from Kaohsiung). There are also big tour buses that drop their passengers at the beaches where they stand at the water's edge and take pictures of themselves holding scarves in the wind and occasionally falling in the surf. We chose to spend the morning hiking in the Kenting National Park. But first, scooters. I fell in love with my little panda rental. Cute, right? The scooters were electric, so very quiet, and small but zippy. If we had gotten scooters when we arrived in Taiwan I would have done a lot less biking.

Scooters make it so much easier to get to just-out-of-reach places. I'm not sure I would have tried biking up to the national park. It was a very long hill and didn't take long to get high enough for some pretty spectacular views.

Since visiting this place requires walking, there weren't many people. (That seems to be a universal truth. The further you walk from a parking lot, the less people you see.) As always in Taiwan, we found some really incredible trees. This one was hollow inside and looked like it was straight out of Tolkien's Fangorn Forest.

We found some amusing signs as well. This one says "oops."

The hills around Kenting are old. uplifted coral reefs, so the rocks are craggy and and holey. We were delighted to find a cave that was well lit and beautiful. Another plus, there was no one else there so it wasn't claustrophobic to walk through. This stalactite sparkled and glowed.

At the top of the hike there was a tower with a 360 degree view of the southern tip of Taiwan. It was also a cafe so we got to drink some tea while we enjoyed the view.

After our hike we scootered down to the beach. We passed a cemetery along the way. Burial plots are located based on feng shui and dot the hills all around the countryside. Being on a hill, especially facing the water, is very auspicious.

The beach was wonderful, as expected. Not many people actually go in the water, but we had plenty of company under the umbrellas that lined the beach. Sun, surf, a nice breeze. And plenty of sunscreen so you're not too red at the end of the day. Being this close to the equator certainly makes it easy to burn.

Being the tourist town that it is, Kenting rolls out a busy night market along the main street. Fortunately, the police station and its resident zebra sculpture are nearby to keep everyone in line. We ate corndogs and ice cream and jostled along with the crowd. There were even fireworks.