kenting yee haw!
--Jan 10, 2005

A few days ago we drove down to Kenting from Kao Hsiung. The drive was very interesting and we stopped at quite a few places, including a nice little hole-in-the-wall lunch place that served 7-courses of seafood right out of the adjacent sea, and a number of other beautiful spots once we hit the coast near Kenting (see the taiwan gallery for pictures).

Susan's mom & Grace, getting into the spirit

Kenting is a popular Taiwanese vacation spot. It has the feel of a little beach town and people often come down and rent a house for a week. Sekim had arranged for us to stay at Xiao Kenting Vacation Resort - this sounded great to us mostly because is had the word "Resort" in the title.

We nearly fell over backwards when we arrived. It turns out that Xiao Kenting is a cowboy-themed resort! At first we thought that this seemed really strange (correction: we *still* think it is very strange), but after about 5 minutes of shock we jumped on the bandwagon and got into the swing of things. We donned our orange bandanas (wearing them isn't required, but it is "encouraged") and snapped some photos with typical façade western backgrounds (the whole place looked like the set of a low-budget spaghetti western).

riding the mechanical bull

Over the next two days we did everything we could find to do in this strange and wonderful family-oriented establishment. This included archery, air-pistol shooting, riding a mechanical bull, playing games in the arcade, karaoke and bowling (apparently bowling was very popular in the wild west, you just don't see it in the movies much). We felt like little kids again and even funnier, the older generation did, too. Both nights, we went to bed exhausted, happily returning to our log cabins and crawling under our vibrant floral bedspreads (another historical detail that is often omitted from westerns). It’s a silly place, but we had the best time. We never did get used to all the Taiwanese-speaking cowboys and cowgirls, however.