Class Trip to Kenting National Park

I was pleased to be invited to go along on the 9th grade class trip to Kenting -- a national park covering the southern tip of Taiwan. It is commonly referred to as the "Hawaii of Taiwan" and with pretty good reason.

Here we all were -- 7 buses trekking out at 7:00 AM. It has been awhile since I have been a chaperone and times have certainly changed. I was prepared (a whip and a chair) but they had hired a company to run this operation and they were great. Two of them on every bus keeping the kids busy and happy, they had arranged everything and it was all great and so organized! I had gone so far as to teach them "100 bottles of beer on the wall" but there was never a time they were antsy.

We stopped at the National Aquarium which is really beautiful but a little funny. In many of the big exhibits, after the explanations, there would be a huge "window" which I thought was looking into a tank but was actually a video screen! It was well done though and they do have many live fish and a large collection of penguins.

Then we stopped for lunch and they came and gathered up the teachers and took us to a separate room to eat -- none of this settling of food fights.Then we went to two scenic stops (many pictures taken)and watched the sun set. Then on to a restaurant for wonderful barbecue and singing and dancing and the inevitable Karaoke. Enough of that, on to the night market for an hour. Then to our hotel which was very nice. It was described as "5 star" but I would say that was a relative term. It was clearly set up for big groups as there were 4 beds in each room. All the kids knew who was bunking with whom and went down well.

I don't know if they did bed checks and if anyone patrolled the halls like I expected to do, but the teachers didn't.

In the morning there was a nice breakfast buffet and the kids went down to play beachball dodge ball on the black sand beach -- really nice. Checked out smoothly, back on the bus for an hour and went to this place which is hard to describe. It was clearly set up for school groups as they had a bunch of activities that the kids rotated though: fishing, a boat ride, a visit to an oyster farm and maybe some other stuff that we didn't do. It took a while to run 280 9th graders through the course then back on the bus and home by 5.

All in all a pleasant couple of days and the kids loved it. The only drawback for me was that there is diving there and I once asked if I would be able to go. They said no, that there would not be time to separate me from the "group activities" and that the kids would not even be going swimming, hence, no swim suit or anything. While we were driving down on the first day, the driver turned to me and asked when I wanted to go scuba diving!

Kenting is very lovely. It was a little hard to see things through the mass of kids in various uniforms (it seemed like it was the week for all 9th graders on the island. I was so glad that they wore their uniforms, or we never would have found them). It is very lush and green with lots of palm trees making that great noise that they make, and gorgeous flowers. I plan to go back.