Day 439: Tainan

Jun 15 - Double up on today’s activities to make up for not getting anything done yesterday afternoon. Take the slow bus out west again, this time to the Salt Museum. Our connection is through the town of Jiali, and takes awhile. The first bus shoots out from around a corner and doesn’t even stop at the station, so we wait another 45 minutes for the next one.

At the Salt Museum, with a recreation of the famous jade cabbage. The popsicles Odette holds are fruit flavored, but sprinkled with salt.

A pond by the museum. The staff here were friendly and had little to do today. There were hardly any visitors around.

Salt used to be harvested in shallow ponds along this relatively calm coastline. Production began in the early 1800s, and ceased in 2002 due to declining demand.

The famous Cigu Salt Mountain is about a five-minute walk from the museum. Again, this place looks like it can handle thousands of visitors at the same time, but today there are less than twenty. The piped-in music and large souvenir stores feel eerily out of place.

This ‘mountain’ is a 39,000-ton and 16-meter-high collection of salt to be processed and sold, but was abandoned when the company closed down in 2002. The stairway is partly covered with plastic for ease of walking, but you just tramp over the compacted salt for the most part.

Salt stairs.

Of course there were giant pigs, mushrooms, and a choo-choo.

One of several signs in case you get lost in this vast tourist complex.

In the end, I guess I was glad to come here. It isn’t every day you can summit a hill of pure salt. I did like that we didn’t have to stand in line to do it. This place is very popular with Japanese visitors, who come here because salt is considered a pure substance, and a collection of salt this size is said to have a ‘pure magnetic field’.

Get the long bus connection back to Tainan, eat some udon noodles for lunch, then hop on the train for a 10-minute ride south to the station at Bao’an. Here is another well-known site in the Tainan area, the Chimei Museum.

Built in 1992, this museum has several parts: fine arts (paintings and sculptures), arms and armor, musical instruments, and a natural history section full of stuffed animals. There is almost nothing here representative of Taiwan. It feels much more like a venue in western Europe, down to the classical architecture of the building.

‘The Thinker and his Apprentice’, by Rodin.

Looking up into the dome above the central hall.

Front entrance of the museum.

Poseidon?

The ponds and walkways around the museum were nice. And thankfully it stayed dry into late afternoon today.

Odette was a good sport for this one, we thought we had left this sort of thing behind in Europe so many months ago. The stuffed animals in the natural history section went a long way to keep her interested.

Taiwan (ROC)