Or desperately looking for something to do on a day where the expected rain showers didn't materialize. Perhaps "Scraping the bottom of the barrel" might be a more appropriate subject heading. In any case, we first drove to the "seaside" town of Lungching (Longjing) 龍井, home to the world's highest carbon dioxide-emitting power plant in the world (41.3 million tons of CO2 annually, folks!). Despite the attempt of the plant's operators to hide this fact by painting the smokestacks in colors pretty enough to excite a 2 1/2 year-old child, the most interesting thing going on at the waterfront was a tugboat guiding a bulk carrier registered in Valletta called Conquistador into a berth (the cargo ship in the foreground is the Navios Felicity, out of Panama). Pretty gripping stuff, huh?
We then drove from the power plant to look for a nearby bicycle trail. The plan was to let Amber exercise her legs by riding her tricycle, but the bike path turned out to be a narrow lane on the side of a road, with only the eternal vigilance of worried parents separating children from cars. So at my wife's suggestion, we went to the neighboring town of Wuch'i (Wuci) 梧棲, home of Taichung Harbor.
I've been to the harbor several times over the years, and it never gets any better with each visit. Weekends, especially, are packed with people. Walking through the restaurant area means having to pass through a gauntlet of aggressive restaurant touts grabbing your arm, and shoving menus in your face (one woman even kept telling me how handsome I was in an attempt to get us to sit down and eat something!). The main fish market can be interesting, but only up to a point - how much noise, combined with pushing and shoving, and odors of dead sea creatures, can a normal human being put up with? All of the above could be tolerable if there was actually a beautiful sea view to compensate, but the ocean is hidden behind large concrete blocks, and the adjacent park area has deteriorated rapidly since my last visit several years ago. So naturally the editors of Compass Magazine, those masters of making silk purses out of sows' ears, rate the port as one of T'aichung's (Taijhong) 台中 "must-see" destinations!
Here's a video of a portion of the quiet, contemplative stroll we took through the fish market:
Shouldn't the sale of hammerhead sharks be banned (if it isn't already)?
I admit to tampering with the photograph on the top. The ocean didn't look anywhere near this nice from standing atop a concrete tetrahedron at Taichung Harbor!
Better luck next Sunday, I hope.
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