Kaohsiung Siaogang Half-Day Mini Trip Itinerary Recommendations

Text and photos by Tung Yu-hua

Board the Kaohsiung MRT Red Line, head south, get off at the final stop, Siaogang, and set out on a half-day mini trip.

Having lived for years in the Zuonan area of what was formerly North Kaohsiung, I had probably been to Siaogang about three times in my life. I had always thought of Siaogang as a sparsely populated place because of the vast tracts of land taken up by the port and the airport. I had taken the bus to Gaozita and ridden a scooter into Hongmaogang before its demolition, but I had never gotten to know this district, also located in Kaohsiung City, on foot. The streetscape was very unfamiliar, yet the sunshine was very familiar.

Exiting from Exit 2 of Siaogang Station, I turned onto the bustling Jinfu Street. It was just past two in the afternoon, and the evening market was already starting to set up. I was surprised by this market, where the variety of fruit was abundant. It was the beginning of mango season, and the air was filled with a sweet fragrance, mixed with the sweet-tart scent of lychees.

At the end of Jinfu Road, you turn onto a small road along the side of a factory. As the name suggests, is it a road beside the airport? Or beside a clothing factory? (After checking, it is the Combined Logistics Command clothing factory.) On the left side of the road is a long wall, and on the right are already-completed public housing units. Turning into the public housing area, all is quiet. This is an area redeveloped from a military dependents' village. The trees that remain are very old, and the houses are old too, but they have collapsed or been completely transformed. Yet the habits here are still old-fashioned: under the old trees that remain, a group of elderly men sit playing chess and chatting; on the other side, in the public housing, a row of elderly women sits, and across from them are an equal number of foreign caregivers.

The trees are very old, and the houses are old too. They are gradually being redeveloped, but the redevelopment is haphazard, with heights mismatched and misplaced. Single-story bungalows are squeezed between two three- or four-story buildings; or they become a row of villas named after famous Japanese resort spots. The atmosphere here is still old-fashioned: the quiet of an afternoon in a military dependents' village.

Because it has been carved up by old and new buildings, the alleys between the old military dependents' housing have become the most atmospheric places.

Ducking at random into an alley wide enough for only one person, I hardly dared breathe, not knowing which houses still had people living in them. But relying on the sound of footsteps close to the walls and the clatter of spatulas, I wove back and forth through the small paths, occasionally coming upon a small plot of land between the buildings, planted with a mix of bananas, wild vegetables, and the like. The alleys give cats the privacy they need to live. Winding this way and that, I encountered five or six cats of dazzling coat colors, arching their backs at the intruding visitor.

The living environment has been chopped into very fine fragments. The towering buildings lack a human touch. The only small park retains the sound of playful clamor, yet it cannot return to the closeness of the old military dependents' village, where every dog and chicken could be heard. Without much thought, the environment has become scattered and fragmentary. What remains amid the fragments seems to be one or two old shops, preserving the scene of flowers and plants grown at the doorstep. In one glance you can see buildings of different heights that grew up in different periods, swinging between old and new, existing between quiet and clamor. With a rumbling sound, I looked up: it was a plane that had just taken off.

The endpoint of this little trip can be a travel cafe tucked among the alleys, a small guesthouse that offers lodging to travelers. The second generation of a military dependents' village family, with a yard at home, introduces travelers from everywhere to Kaohsiung in a preserved, unrenovated old house. In an afternoon you can enjoy a simple coffee or black tea with two pieces of handmade cookies, with two leaves of homegrown mint picked and placed on the plate just before serving, accompanying the afternoon sunlight as it sets in the west.

On the way back, I strolled through the already-prepared evening market. Each vendor has their own ideas about their stall. Some specialize in just one or two kinds of fruit; some run mixed fruit stalls; the vegetable stalls also seem to come in one or two different forms. The riot of color is a very earthy kind of beauty. Each stall has its own regular customers, as well as me, a strange face who may never come again. In the end, I bought one bamboo shoot in season and 5 tomatoes for 20 yuan.

The vitality of a market is still something a supermarket or hypermarket cannot match.