February 23
We got up early to meet for our tour and go through immigration together
but when we got back from breakfast, we were told that we were skipping this
port due to the high winds and the captain wanted to get ahead of the weather
and we should arrive early to Keelung tonight instead of tomorrow morning.
We spent the next hour contacting our tour guide and reimbursing our tour
mates for the day’s tour and setting up the request for the refund of the tour.
This would have been a repeat port for us, and I was hoping for something
different to do, but honestly, I wasn’t seeing anything else, so we decided to
visit these places again. We had other stops that filled the day and made our
stops shorter at these places so this time we could take our time and see more
of it. (quite a bit was missed last time) Here is the blog post from that visit
in 2013. Retired Nomads: Kaohsiung, Taiwan - February 27
Description of things we would have seen:
Fo Guang Shan Monastery, formerly the Buddhist Memorial Center is an
enormous, complex that more than doubled in size with the 2011 addition of the
Fo Guang Shan Buddha Museum, built to house a tooth relic of the Buddha. The
huge and visually stunning new area includes a 108-meter seated metal Buddha,
the tallest in Taiwan. A Jade reclining Buddha & Buddha’s Tooth Relic is
located here.
The older, original monastery area takes Buddhist decoration to the
extreme, with tens of thousands of Buddha statues. (impressive and they are all
different)
Buddha Land – a 36-meter statue of Amitabha Buddha towers over the old Fo
Guang Shan Monastery area. From here, it is also possible to access the many
statues of the Foguangshan Cemetery.
Pure Land Cave – filled with statues
Main Shrine
The Museum area is “flashier” and more “hands on” with many lunch places
at the Museum area.
The Lotus Pond scenic area on the northern outskirts of Kaohsiung City is
surrounded by Confucius Temple in the north and the Dragon and Tiger pagodas
and Spring and Autumn Pavilions in the south.
We didn’t see the Confucius Temple last time as it was closed for some
unknown reason. So, we hoped to get inside this time and see the Spring and
Autumn Pavilions since we skipped those last time. Dragon and Tiger are in the
process of being renovated but we wanted to make sure those who hadn’t seen
them could get the outside photo op as they are quite striking.
So, another sea day. They inserted a lecture, and we went to watch that.
The dining room is usually closed on sea days, and they opened it for lunch and
of course the Lido was open for lunch. We watched the movie Ronin.
So, now we wait to see if we arrive in time to get immigration face to
face done tonight and we possibly can go ashore in Keelung tonight or at least
not to have to do it before our tour time tomorrow morning.
Well, immigration was not cooperative and so we couldn't get off the ship that evening and had to get up early again to do the face-to-face immigration.
We went to Trumpeter Shaw's show which was a tribute to Louis Armstrong. Only slightly better than his first show.
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