Bonus Picture Post! #1 - Orchid Island

Dear readers, I have discovered that facebook uses strange methods for determining what thumbnail picture options it offers when I post links to articles here. Apparently it only likes the smaller ones. (If anyone has more technical info, feel free to leave me a comment)

What that means for you is, I include lots of pictures in this post, to test which ones FB lets me use, and some readers might notice me changing the sizes on them.

For starters, here are some from one of the most interesting side-trips I got to do during my year in Taiwan (that wasn't an unplanned visa run!). In August, some of my Taiwanese fellow gospel camp volunteers and I took a ferry over to Orchid Island (Lan Yu) off the coast of Taiwan for a couple days of camp staff retreat after the summer camping season was over. We also had a mini-camp for the kids on the island, I might post some pics of that later if people are interested. (Basically that means respond if you want to see pictures of cute kids, Taiwanese camp volunteers, and one white guy)

Leaving the harbor

Arriving at Orchid Island, with oddly-shaped mountains shrouded in mist...

The view from our "hotel." I believe the large building is a government-built school.
Years ago Orchid Island was selected as a location for a nuclear waste dumping site,
but the local people were told it was going to be a fish cannery and tricked into agreeing...
so they got lots of government-paid-for infrastructure by way of a belated sort-of apology.
(I don't know if this story is entirely accurate, but it's what I was told)

A concrete model of the local people's traditional seagoing canoes.
The native people of Orchid Island are not Chinese, but Pacific Islander.
Many anthropologists believe that Oceania was populated largely by ocean-going
peoples who island-hopped from Taiwan thousands of years ago.

A quiet moment by the sea, at sunset.

We quickly found the real rulers of the island were wise-looking goats.

We woke up very early one morning before dawn, to get to the top of a mountain and watch the sunrise.

The pre-dawn scooter ride was exciting

We assemble at the mountaintop observatory area

Dawn approaches over the Pacific, beyond the lights of a fishing village.

Roughly the same picture, a little later

The locals said the farthest rock peaks rising from the ocean used to be one long ridge,
but during WWII in the early morning dark the Americans thought it was a Japanese destroyer and bombed it.

Fun with perspective

I got some National Geographic quality shots on this trip, it's really a beautiful island.

Alright, I have four albums from this trip on facebook for the especially curious. (and for people who prefer to look at pictures with people in them) But I think this is a good enough set of pictures for one post.
We'll close with a picture of my most interesting meal of that trip:

Flying fish noodle soup!

Stay tuned for more random picture posts in the future... I have thousands of Taiwan photos and I'll post a few up now and then. If you are interested to see pics of any particular kind of stuff (People, Cities, Food, Nature, etc) feel free to leave a comment and let me know.