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Kaohsiung
Kaohsiung is a large port city on the southwest coast of Taiwan. It's about 45 minutes south from Tainan. We spent 3 days here in April 2023. Some of the main attractions include the beautiful Lotus Pond and the massive Fo Guang Shan Buddha Museum. Kaohsiung had a different vibe for me than other cities like Taipei and Tainan. It felt much newer, the roads were wider, buildings more modern etc. It also however had its uniquely Taiwanese night markets as well as food culture. While not as complex as Taipei's, Kaohsiung's metro system makes it extremely easy to travel throughout the city for very cheap, including to and from the airport. Kaohsiung is a city definitely worth visiting in Taiwan!
The Lotus Pond is a large pond in the north part of the city. It's famous for having the tiger and dragon pagodas, autumn and spring pavilions, Zuoying Yuandi Temple and Temple of Confucius. There are also several other temples around the lake. We took the train from Sanduo Shopping District Station near our accomodation to the Ecological Park station. From here you can walk to the pond and spend a few hours walking around it to the places mentioned above. I suggest then walking to the Zuoying Station if you need to return to the Sanduo area. The pond with all of its pagodas and pavilions is an extremely picturesque beautiful place to visit in Kaohsiung. There are no entry fees for any of the places on this pond but there are donation boxes. It's a spiritual place and you can learn lots about local customs and tradition.
The Fo Guang Shan Buddha Museum was an incredible museum that for me is only rivaled by Mexico's National Anthropology Museum. About 30 minutes outside of the city this huge buddha museum features several pagodas, a massive buddha statue on a pyramid shaped structure which houses the museum and well maintained gardens. Inside the museum are beautifully carved halls and prayer rooms with golden buddha statues, a tooth relic from buddha and artwork made of rare jems. It also featured lots of audio-visual information displays and gave information about the life and teachings of buddha. This museum is a must see in Kaohsiung. Furthermore, it's completely free to enter! You could take a taxi but if you want to reduce costs you can go to Zuoying train station then transfer onto a bus. The E02 Hafo Express buses go straight from there to the museum within about 30 minutes.
The riverside was nice place to take a walk in Kaohsiung and showed how large of a shipping port the city has. We were staying at the landmark tower SkyTower 85 which was just across from the riverside. It was a nice place to go for a walk, see some of the animal sculptures and landmarks of the city like the Exhibition Center. The iconic Sky Tower is pictured below. It felt like staying in a city inside of a city as the huge towers feature several businesses like tourist agencies, massage, restaurants and a 7/11.
Like most Taiwanese cities Kaohsiung has a large amount of food markets around. I went to two different ones while there: Lihue Market and Xingzhong Market. Both featured a huge variety of great local dishes. At The Xingzhong Market I stopped at a restaurant which served various meat curry dishes with rice and three sides of your choice. I had an amazing fish curry. The market we ended up at the most was the Lihue Market. This one was the most walkable as the street actually becomes more of a pedestrian street (there are still motorbikes driving through). We enjoyed coming here and trying different foods like pork, fried chicken, various soups, milk tea and more. The night markets offer great insight to Taiwanese culture and these two markets are accessible by metro. To add if you go to the Lihue Market you can see the Dome of Light (pictured below) at the Formosa Street train station!
I've already mentioned that Kaohsiung has an MRT system and this is one of the best ways to get around. We stayed in the Sanduo Shopping District but could easily access tourist sights by taking the train as well as a bus once. The bus networks are also good and can be found fairly easily on google maps. The best option in Taiwan is to get an Easy Card, which is a pre-paid card that you can use to pay for public transport as well as purchases at specific retailers.
