Thank you and farewell the mountains, rivers and the great outdoors.  These are Taiwan’s backyard treasures and my pure delight.

Thank you and farewell to all Taiwan’s keen photographers and the Kaohsiung Flickr group. The monthly meetups and all the fantastic photo opportunities that Taiwan has to offer.

Thank you and farewell to all those fishermen, fish markets, seafood meals and fishing boats.

Thank you and farewell to the farmers and good people living on the Gaoping river plains.

Thankyou and farewell to the all the great people we’ve had the pleasure of meeting.

Thank you and farewell to Taiwan bloggers and Shan Ding Lu readers. I have thoroughly enjoyed photographing and blogging on the meanderings of living in Southern Taiwan. I have also thoroughly enjoyed reading many of the Taiwan blogs. There is some fantastic content provided by many and varied dedicated bloggers. My RSS feeds will remain a constant tie to you all. A special thanks to Fotozon and the Taiwan Picture of the day for publishing many of Shan Ding Lu’s The Weekly Photo.

Thank you and farewell Taiwan.

Our immediate neighborhood is made up of ordinary working people. The type Australian politicians like to call “battlers”. They are also a wonderful mix of young and old. They are mostly native Taiwanese but a few KMT immigrants, Indonesian and Philippine maids and Vietnamese brides as well.

Taiwanese is the language of the streets. The community loudspeaker only broadcasts in Taiwanese, the young and middle-age communicate in Mandarin between themselves but the old and intergenerational language is Taiwanese. Most houses contain three generations, some four. Of the six houses surrounding us there are 4-2, 4-3, 6-2, 8-3, 6-3, 5-3 (people-generations) and us at 5-2.

The house next door sells vegetarian meals on a very low key basis.

Not far away the local breakfast store provides a variety of tasty and filling meals.

Every day a dozen or so vendors drive by selling fruit and vegetables, household items and sweet tofu snacks. There is even one that occasionally comes by collecting old scooters.

The temple at the end of the street is a key social point and the place for many local activities.

The street is a very social place. After school and in the evening there are always kids out riding bikes, people out chatting, playing badminton and generally whiling the time away.

There are a few Vietnamese wives and a lot of Indonesian maids. An Indonesian maid is now the primary form of elderly care.

Overall, the very noticeable thing is the good healthy mix of young and old

There are plenty more photos from around the neighborhood in The neighborhood album section.

Night time view across the small pocket amongst which we live.

View larger map

Fongshan Military Academy This covers a huge tract of land. Though reasonably benign, it is an important military training ground that is a continual source of small arms practice fire. And surely a target of one of the 1400 odd missiles China will use one day. Let’s hope they are accurate enough to miss our place

Mental asylum Not in itself a threat, but placed between the military academy and the land-fill it an indication of the quality land use of the area.
Daliao landfill Or should that be “land-full”. A large hill now exists where a valley once was. They are now filling a valley right next to the full one. This is uphill from our house and not more that 500 metres away.

Traditional grave sites These are a common sight all over Taiwan. Hills are auspiciously good locations to place a grave. Grave sites are auspiciously bad to live near. And we live near hills full of graves

Christian cemetries Approximately 5% of Taiwanese are Christians. We live just one kilometre from 100% of Kaohsiung Christian graves.

Kaohsiung airport This was once a very busy and noisy airport. Now with the high speed rail much of the old noisy regular domestic flights have gone. Daliao covers the take-off flight path for the airport.

Daliao industrial zone This is where chemicals are concocted, boats are made, sewage discharged, recyclables recycled and poisoned residents ignored.

*China Steel refineryThe largest is Taiwan. Located adjacent China Shipbuilding, Taiwan’s largest shipbuilder. The source of much of Kaohsiung’s air pollutants.

Missile silos The Sky Bow missile placement that has been pixelled out in Google Earth. If the military academy is not a Chinese missile magnet, this installation certainly is.

Petrochemical plantsThe source for all sorts of odours. Environmental groups have successfully restricted development of this zone recentley. It has (rightfully) been the source of much local protest over the years.

Linyuan Oil refinery This is part of the larger chemical and steel industrial area. When passing through Linyuan you can constantly whiff the hydrocarbons.

View from the top of LinYuan hill adjacent the missile silos. Looking across to the Gaoping river, petrochemical  and oil refinery plants

To make up for having to attend on Saturday, school is out for Monday. I’m not sure what the working parents will do tomorrow.

The weather at this time of year is absolutely gorgeous. It is really the time of year to be enjoying the outdoors and yesterday was a perfect day for it. There was a band, miniature cauldron and flame and lots of parading.

They had running, relays, tug-of-war, 3 legged races and even an egg-and-spoon race.

There were lots of proud parents watching on.

An event like this can not go by without a fair full of food, game and trinket vendors.

Here is the paper fishing net fair game. A very flimsy sheet of paper is stretched across a plastic paddle. 1 paddle for 10 yuan, 6 for 50 yuan. You get to keep all the goldfish you can catch before the paper fails.

We are now a household of 8 new goldfish and two small turtles.

The kids still had their usual school provided meal so they returned to the classrooms during lunch time. They look pretty much like the classrooms I attended so many years ago on a very different continent.

Here is my daughter’s classroom.

And here is my son’s.

The rapid drop in birthrate is having a real impact on schools all over Taiwan. Elementary school covers years 1 to 6. Shan Ding has 6 year 6 classes by only 4 year 1 classes. Pretty much the demographics of Taiwan proper.

As so often happens, a few nervous young people shyly asked to take a photo of me and my daughter. Something I always oblige as I’m never without my own camera ready to reciprocate. Here are the shy English speakers of yesterday.

Though very different from the sports days I once attended, the essence of festivities and activities were still there.

Why they even had long standing at assembly listening to lofty speeches by the headmaster.

This is not a rare occurrence. We seem to lose mains water pressure every couple of months. But that is not as bad as it once was. Taiwanese have endured a long history of an unreliable water supply.

Mains water pressure until recent years has always been unreliable and most households needed a booster pump to supply it reliably.  My wife recalls from her childhood days when they often went for long spells with no water at all. Many older people still maintain buckets of water in reserve for when the supply may be stopped. Indeed, every house in Taiwan has a roof-top storage and pressure tank.

Stainless steel water tanks reflecting the setting sun

Atop our roof

We use no less than three sources of water in our house. The first is the mains. This is used for all non-consumption purposes. It has a faint smell of chlorine indicating it has been treated. However, boiling it leaves notable scale on the water surface and all the pipes slowly clog with scale. Though it may be safe to drink, no-one in Taiwan does.

The second source of water is from our local water dispenser. This provides three grades of water for between 10 and 20 yuan per 20 litres. (USD 0.3 – 0.6). This provides all the cooking and boiling water for consumption.

The third source is from the commercial grade water filter connected to the mains. This is our fresh drinking water.

Anyway, around 8 am a truck and excavator arrived to find the leaking pipe. After a lot of digging and scratching they located it under the storm water drain. They patched it, filled in the hole and roughly smoothed over the diggings.

We were somewhat concerned that it would remain yet another rough patch on our tarmac-tapestry of a laneway.

But, two weeks later a road crew arrived, dug up the temporary pavement and put down a solid one.

Though the water supply fails occasionally the people are always quick to return the service. Though no one recommends you drink the mains water, I suspect it is just fine if you do. Though it is a burden and pretty ugly for all houses to maintain a roof-top water tank, they do guarantee a cool-shower or a toilet flush when the mains outside your house bursts.

Typhoon Fung-wong has been bearing down on Taiwan for the past few days. Like a thundering bowling ball it hit the central east coast early this morning, hurled over the 3000m mountain range and left the central west coast early this evening. Though the winds were not too strong, the rain has been steady. And there is yet more to come over the next day as the tail of the typhoon drops its remaining water. It is now on its way to China and hopefully on course to Beijing for a final scrub down before the Olympics.

Today was a typhoon holiday, the second in three weeks. All government and major businesses were closed to allow people to stay home, watch TV, sing songs and nibble through mountains of snacks. Small shops and many markets remained open for business. Like the rain jacket van and the vegetable vendor below.

Things are generally well organised for the heavy rains. Drainage is pretty good, all rivers have large levees, bridges and overpasses are built to deal with the volumes of rain that can come.

Our own laneway is prone to flooding whenever we receive more than a few hundred millimeters over a couple of hours. Despite regular complaints to the authorities and the occasional re-digging of the drains, most the neighborhood have resigned to providing individual flood control. We let the floodwaters into the outside section of the house but board up the two ground floor entries to give us an extra 30cm of flood comfort. Last year the boards were reached twice. So far this year they have not been reached.

And every good rain takes out at least a few roads. Typhoon Kalmaegi three weeks ago washed out sections of this road below. The excavators here are widening the river just 2 day ago. In anticipation of more flooding perhaps?

Or an orchard placed too close to a river.

When it rains, people generally just get on doing what they always do.

Here are links to some East Asian typhoon resources.

• Taiwan Central Weather Bureau 
• Japan Tropical Cyclone Information
• Typhoon2000, a great reference for all typhoons

It is that time of year when the house starts to leak, leather boots and food stains go mouldy and everyone starts looking for any cool relief available.

The first rain also brought the recently harvested rice field adjacent to us to life with the sound of frogs. This evening there were hundreds of them all singing in the new wet season. The kids were very excited to put on gum-boots and headlamps and do a bit of frog spotting between rain showers.

Here is one frog going through the croaking motions.

The sound of all those frogs was really wonderful. Here you can see the vibrations in the surrounding water as he croaks away.

And of course there were other slimmies and crawlies to discover as well.

The field was tilled with a trusty John Deere tractor back on the 26th of December and sown with rice seedlings 4 days later.

They grew steadily over the five months until it was harvested on the 17th of May.

I was not around for the final 5 weeks of growing and missed the harvest by one day on my return. (Also the reason for the lack of blogs)

But the plains between us and the Goaping river 5 kilometres away are all being harvested at the moment. A contractor arrives with his Japanese built harvester and removes a small field in about an hour. It is harvested green while the rice kernels are still quite moist. The final drying and husking is done and a community based threshing plant.

Though completely different from the wheat farming I grew up with in Western Australia it has the same lovely agrarian feel. Something about that pouring grain just takes me straight back to the summer of my youth.

It seems that each essential service is responsible for connecting to any new development. And these services typically run down the middle of the road. Most streets are a patchwork of different service entry scars, even the recently paved ones.

A road not far from us is having high speed data cables excavated into it on both sides. Apart from the disruption to traffic, the final surface now has motor scooter hazardous bumps all over it.

During digging they cover the trench with large steel plates. These were always recycled ship hulls but more often these days appear to be raw steel plate. In the 60’s Kaohsiung had a large ship dismantling industry and old ship steel can be found quite often around Kaohsiung.

Here in Fengshan not far from us a major works is under-way that has consumed half the road and part of the intersection. The adjacent clothing store make good of a inconvenient situation.

The Koahsiung-Pingtung bridge over the Goaping river is having two new sections added. A span of the current bridge apparently collapsed a few years ago. They started building the new bridge then ran out of funds and construction halted for a year or so. It is now proceeding quite fast and should be complete soon.

And here the road-side mannequin with articulated arms warns motorists to slowdown. I suspect he is as effective as a real person and no-one takes any notice.

Update:

The road badly repaired after being excavated down both sides was resurfaced in June 2008. They smoothed out all the bumps and now make motorscootering as easy as prior to the roadworks. (Picture below)

Ma Ying-jeou and running mate on the left. KMT, red and blue, number (2). Frank Shieh and running mate on the right. DPP, green, number(1)

The voting was very well organised. The rules have been honed over the last 3 elections and now make for an incredibly smooth process. There is no campaigning allowed on election day. No overt display of campaign material within 30 metres of the ballot area. There were lots of police officers and volunteers to help out. The venue was the local school. Also, no photos inside the voting room.

And the result was quick to come through. Once public announcement was allowed all television stations showed a running tally. By 5pm the outcome was pretty clear. KMT’s Ma Ying-jeou, (2) will be president of Taiwan for the next four years. A result the majority of people in Taiwan are, by implication, happy with.

I wandered to the local DPP office, (green incumbent party, now opposition) to see how the die-hard supporters were taking the result. Pretty subdued actually.

Though there is a lot at stake with the outcome of this election, there is a lot to be very positive about. Recent changes to the legislature and terms of office will ensure a more stable and less partisan politicking. Politics in Taiwan has been hamstrung by the extreme partisan nature of the opposing parties. Unfortunately the party bickering was the reason there were two referendum questions rather than one. And also why so many voters boycotted both referendum questions and without the required 50% threshold of voters, they were declared failed.

If you are particularly interested in the outcome or commentary on the results please check these links.

• Taiwan Matters. A group blog on politics in Taiwan.
• Taipei Times election results
• A View from Taiwan Taiwan’s die-hard green blogger.
• Thirsty Ghosts A great analysis on the two referendum questions.