Not About Food

Kenting was not about food.

Within 15 minutes walk from my definition-of-touristy, choked-with-scooter-hawkers hotel, all the noise fell away – all the people must have been swallowed up by their tour buses – and a mysterious gate appeared at the entrance to something called ‘Frog Rock’. The man at the gate seemed surprised that anyone was going to Frog Rock, but he dutifully woke up from his nap to take my NT$30. I walked down the deserted street, past a bunch of sea-battered, white-walled, temple-roofed buildings, past a sign that announced I would soon be seeing a giant rock in the shape of a frog, through a natural tunnel made of pockmarked black volcanic rock, and into a landscape which, while it had nothing to do with rocks shaped like frogs, had everything to do with being seismically terrifying.

It was immediately apparent, even though my experience with geology consists solely of sleeping through a summer class in college, that this area had once – even recently – been a seething, roiling mass of lava. Porous black rocks, looking like sponges from a distance but feeling like coral on the feet, lay scattered and tumbled into the turquoise water, each pore home to a family of crabs and a starfish or two. They rose dramatically away on the cliff side and stood twisted as though they’d just been tossed there by a violent flow. And the sand made a constant clicking sound that seemed mechanical at first, but then it became clear that this was because the sand was virtually made of hermit crabs. Ranging in size from a quarter of a pinky nail to a palm and clad in every kind of shell or shell fragment, they scurried forward, backward, and sideways, fell at me from rocks and trees, and tried to become briefly motionless upon being picked up, only to forget their fear in five seconds and emerge to pinch at my fingers.

I spent hours here, listening to the sea glug at the pores on the rocks like a thousand little suction cups, emerging in time to go to the famous Kenting Night Market and purchase an overpriced, tough giant squid leg and some mushy grilled scallops with an MSG-heavy powder dusting, and ostensibly to cheer myself up after that, some dumplings that were advertised as shrimp but were made of gristly five-spiced pork and a syrupy sauce so cloying I threw the whole thing away.

The next day, I rented freedom in the form of an engine-knocking little scooter and scooted from white-sand beach to black-sand beach, watching tourists buy jet-ski rides from the locals and shriek through the layers of water color, which ranged from golden green at the shore to navy at the horizon, with some surprising stripes along the way. I waded, but didn’t swim, as the waves crashed right on the shore with a violence that sent splashes twice the height of my head. For lunch, I stopped at Houbiho Harbor, famous for its sashimi, to purchase a NT$300 plate of assorted sashimi, sliced such that the connective tissue got caught in my teeth and the skin retained a bunch of little hard nubs, and tasting essentially like fishy air. Missing Hokkaido’s seafood like crazy, I scooted up a mountain into the National Recreation Area, which was ten degrees cooler than the coast and gave me a 360 degree view of the peninsula, which was wreathed in clouds which were magically not raining, only providing shade.

So, Kenting was not about food.