Day 27-30
Kaohsiung — Hash, Cijin & Lanterns
Neon-soaked nights, a drinking club with a running problem, and Taiwan’s grittiest port city.
The Port City Nobody Tells You About
Every backpacker in Asia has a Taipei story. The night markets, the bubble tea, Elephant Mountain at sunset. Kaohsiung rarely gets a mention. That suited me fine.
Taiwan’s second city is a port town in the truest sense — working docks, fishing boats, container ships sliding past the harbour mouth at dawn. It has none of Taipei’s polish, and all of its appetite. The seafood here doesn’t need Instagram hashtags. It just needs a plastic stool and a cold Taiwan Beer.
I’d come south for the Hash. The Hash House Harriers — “a drinking club with a running problem” — have chapters in every corner of Asia, and Kaohsiung’s pack had a run planned through the hills above the harbour. If you’ve never hashed, picture this: forty people of wildly mixed fitness levels chasing flour arrows through jungle trails, stopping at beer checks, singing obscene songs, and generally behaving like teenagers at a scout camp. It is magnificent.
Cijin Island & the Lantern Festival
The ferry to Cijin Island (旗津) takes five minutes and costs almost nothing. On the other side, a seafood street stretches along the waterfront — grilled squid on sticks, fried fish cakes, oyster omelettes sizzling on flat-top griddles. I ate my way down one side and walked back up the other.
Up on the headland, a lighthouse marks the entrance to Kaohsiung harbour. The view at sunset turns the container ships into silhouettes. Somewhere below, fishing boats puttered home trailing diesel smoke and seabirds.
The Lantern Festival had transformed the city centre. Southern Taiwan takes lanterns seriously — we’re not talking a few paper globes strung between lampposts. Entire city blocks blaze with enormous illuminated sculptures, LED dragons, glowing temples reconstructed in light. Kids run between them shrieking. Couples pose for selfies. Old men sit on folding chairs and watch it all with the satisfied air of people who’ve seen thirty of these and still enjoy every one.
Uncle Bob’s & the Road to Hong Kong
The neon signs along Kaohsiung’s bar strips tell their own stories. The famous “100 Restaurant” blazes in Chinese and Japanese, advertising hot pot and seafood to anyone within a three-block radius. Around the corner, Uncle Bob’s flies an Australian flag above its spirits shelf — a reminder that wherever you go in Asia, you’ll find an Aussie who’s opened a bar.
I spent my last night at Bob’s with a mix of hashers and locals, trading stories over cheap whisky. Someone produced a guitar. Someone else produced a second guitar. By midnight we sounded terrible and felt wonderful.
In the morning I’d fly to Hong Kong. But that night, under the neon, Kaohsiung felt like exactly the kind of place where you could stay a month and still not run out of reasons to stick around.