Diving Taiwan is full of surprises, with a variety of dive sites across the country almost unknown to tourists. Simon Pridmore explains Taiwan’s underwater highlights.
Ornate Dermatobranchus © Kyo Liu
Diving Taiwan – Dive Happy Episode 21 Show Notes
- Dive Into Taiwan – Simon’s excellent guidebook to diving Taiwan Amazon.com | Amazon UK
- Kyo Liu’s photography – Kyo contributed the beautiful photos that illustrate Dive Into Taiwan
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Diving Taiwan – Dive Happy Episode 21 Transcript
[0:00:06.6] CM: Hello. Welcome to Dive Happy. I’m your host, Chris Mitchell. On this episode, I’m talking to Simon Pridmore, the author of Dive into Taiwan. Simon, welcome back to the show.
[0:00:18.4] SP: Thanks.
[0:00:19.4] CM: Simon, previously on another episode, we’ve talked about diving in your adopted home of Bali. I would assume that Taiwan diving is somewhat different?
[0:00:31.7] SP: Well, yes. The culture is certainly very different. The diving has some similarities, surprisingly. Albeit, Taiwan is North Pacific and Bali is South Pacific. It’s interesting you say that. The expectations we had when we first went to Taiwan to do this book were that it would be temperate-water diving. We found a lot more tropical fish species than we expected.
[0:00:56.5] CM: Wow. Yeah. I mean, you point this out at the beginning of the book, because you give a really great overview of timelines location. Of course, it’s one of those things that even though I’ve looked at maps of Asia for years and years and years, I never quite realized how close Taiwan is to the Philippines, because it’s the top of the Philippines’ archipelago.
[0:01:18.5] SP: Exactly. Exactly. It’s all part of a chain. If you look at part of the chain of islands, if you like that protects continental Asia from the vast Pacific Ocean. If you begin in the South, you have path-worthy island, a path form and then that pushes into Indonesia and Indonesia curves up and joins the bottom of the Philippines, which then curves up. As you say, there’s a small gap between the northern islands of the Philippines, the Batanes and then Taiwan. Then you curve around a little more and you’ve got Japan. The whole stretch of islands is a barrier. It’s a continental barrier; a volcanic ridge. It’s the Ring of Fire, the western side of the Ring of Fire.
[0:02:03.8] CM: Right. The other thing as well that you point out is key to understanding diving in Taiwan. Also, that Tim Rock points out in his book, 50 best dive sites in Japan is the existence of this very important current, which I can’t pronounce, but you’re going to tell me in a minute, which basically if I understand it, it sweeps up essentially from the Philippines through Taiwan and up into Japan?
[0:02:29.6] SP: Yes, exactly. It’s the Kuroshio. It’s the equivalent of the Gulf Stream, the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic which sweeps up and around the east coast of the United States. The Kuroshio does a similar thing to Asia and it comes in off the Pacific and then sweeps up past the Philippines, then it divides around Taiwan and the main chunk goes by on the eastern side of the islands, while another stretch goes around the south of Taiwan and then comes up into the Taiwan Strait, between Taiwan and mainland China.
Then the major part of the current, the major part of the stream then moves on to the southern islands of Japan beyond. This current carries warm water, which means that in Taiwan you have warm water diving, as warm as Philippine diving, as warm as Bali diving and you have all the tropical fish that you’d expect to find much further south.
[0:03:27.6] CM: I’d say that is remarkable. That current is like the lifeblood of all of that life existing and evolving in those different locations.
[0:03:35.3] SP: Yes.
[0:03:35.9] CM: Just to digress for a moment, have you ever gone diving at the very north of the Philippines? It’s not something I’ve ever already heard about.
[0:03:42.7] SP: No. No, I haven’t. That’s an interesting point, because most of the diamond takes place further south as you know. There’s an issue that relates to Taiwan and also to the islands of Micronesia, which is typhoons and the northern Philippines gets a lot of typhoons. Taiwan gets typhoons, especially during the summer months, and as do the Marianas and southern Japan. It’s noticeable and obvious that in those areas, there are no dive liveaboards. The only liveaboard diving in a typhoon zone is in truck, which is where the liveaboards can tuck into the lagoon and then knocked in open ocean.
I wonder if that’s a factor. I wonder if that’s why dive resorts hadn’t become established in the north of the Philippines. Most of them are further south will make it. Not beyond the typhoons, but where typhoons are less frequent.
[0:04:44.7] CM: This is something you obviously raise in your book. Yeah, there is a distinct dive season in Taiwan and it can get pretty rugged and hairy in the offseason. You talk about there’s six key areas for diving in Taiwan. I think the way to begin is talking about the one that maybe people have heard about, is certainly the only place in Taiwan I’d heard about, until I read your book, which is called Green Island. The reason that’s famous is supposedly because of hammerheads.
[0:05:13.9] SP: Yes.
[0:05:16.0] CM: It did make me chuckle when I read your book, because you pointed out that it’s actually an island and you go there for hammerheads. It all sounds rugged and intrepid that it’s actually the major place for people to go to learn scuba diving.
[0:05:27.5] SP: Yes. It is. Green Island became famous, because of the hammerheads. As in many places where you have hammerhead sharks, schooling hammerhead sharks, they’re deep. It’s seasonal when they come into shallow water. They may well be there the whole year round, but they’re way beyond scuba diving depths for most of the year. It’s where the currents are very strong and hammerhead sharks tend to like current swept areas. Well, they’re certainly why divers first started going there.
Green Island also is an excellent location for scuba diving year-round. Once the dive centers developed and then people in Taiwan started diving, which as you know from the book is relatively recent, then Green Island was already set up to cater to there were dive centers there and there were people that knew how to dive. That’s probably why that’s the hub for everything. Green Island also has reefs and pinnacles and wrecks and macro muck diving. It’s pretty much got everything. And it has this vast beach, where essentially Taiwan people learn to dive.
[0:06:37.7] CM: Wow. You talk obviously that during the summer season, most of the dive areas in Taiwan do get busy, because obviously, all the locals like to go there and then you recommend shoulder season, which is roughly September as the optimum time to go. When it’s in shoulder season, basically end of summer, is it tropical conditions in the water?
[0:06:59.5] SP: Absolutely.
[0:07:00.1] CM: Is it?
[0:07:01.3] SP: Absolutely. From April through to the beginning of October, you’ve got tropical conditions. You’ve got 3mm wetsuits the maximum and you’ve got clear, clear water.
[0:07:12.2] CM: Wow.
[0:07:12.8] SP: Yeah. No, it’s beautiful. Yes, you mentioned September. September is a great time to go. April to June is also a very good time to go.
[0:07:19.9] CM: Yeah. Green Island is in the south of Taiwan and most of the diving you talk about most of the dive areas are also all around the south, which is not terribly surprising as that’s the part that’s nearest to the Philippines, and so the warmest and so on and so forth. With the one major place in the north is near to Taipei, which again I found really, I shouldn’t be that surprised I guess just because it’s a convenient location, but that seemed to me pretty amazing that within an hour’s drive from Taipei, you could go dive.
[0:07:52.4] SP: Yes. It surprised us. It’s astonishing. The diving is quite good and an hour’s drive out of a massive city and a city that was quite heavily industrialized. It’s not so much the case now, but certainly that was the case when Taiwan was building itself as a nation.
Yes, the water up there, the diving, especially muck diving, critters and that thing is excellent just outside of Taipei. I think if you were passing through and you were in Taipei and you decide to do a day’s diving, you wouldn’t be disappointed at all. It would probably give you a taste for returning and doing a proper dive holiday. I can imagine that as a sequence of events.
[0:08:32.7] CM: Right. Yes. I mean, that’s one of the other nice things that you put together in the book is some solid itineraries of how you would spend a week, or two weeks in Taiwan traveling between these different areas. There’s several others. I mean, where was your other personal favorite area to go besides Green Island and outside Taipei?
[0:08:55.7] SP: I think the best diving we had was off Penghu. Penghu is a small archipelago between Taiwan and the mainland. There are ferries out there, but they take a while to get there, so it’s best to fly. It’s less than an hour to fly from Taipei or Kaohsiung. Then it was Wild West Island. The currents are quite strong. They’ve created a marine park, which is actually protected, unlike many marine parks in Asia. The fish life is coming back. From that point of view, that was probably the most rewarding diving that we had.
I describe it in the book. There’s only one guy running charters there at the moment and he has a three-dive day package that he sells. He’s got a well-fitted out boat. He knows the waters extremely well. They’ve got a series of dive sites that seriously are fabulous, a really, really good few days diving. Apart from that, you’re diving in a region of basalt islands, uplifted basalt islands, which means that most of the islands have parts of them, sections and it looked like the Giant’s Causeway. You have these basalt pillars. Not only do you have diving, you’ve got some quite interesting landscapes as well.
[0:10:16.6] CM: Yes. From the photos in the book and it really reminded me of Iceland, it was that very similar dramatic black volcanic rock formations.
[0:10:25.8] SP: Yes. Well, that you have on both sides. You’ve got on the west side of Taiwan, you’ve got Penghu. Then on the south east, south of Green Island, you’ve got another island called Lanyu, or Orchid Island. That like Green Island is is an extinct volcano. It’s a remnant of the Ring of Fire. The whole place is lava and granite covered with green forest. This also, you said favorite places. It would be a toss-up really, because Orchid Island is quite astonishing too. The people who live there are tribal peoples from the very first people that occupied what is now Taiwan and who then went from there to populate the entire Pacific Ocean.
The Austronesian expansion that went from the south of Taiwan, all the way to Madagascar and then all the way through the Pacific, through the Southeast Asia and Pacific as far as Easter Island, then eventually, turned up in New Zealand. Their relatives, if you like, are still living in Taiwan. One of the tribes that it seems left with the initial phase of the diaspora and then yet for some reason, probably some internecine strife in the northern Philippines, they returned to Taiwan and occupied the previously uninhabited Orchid Island and they are there now.
You have this culture on this island stuck out in the Pacific Ocean all on its own with this mass of a big volcanic lump, if you like, surrounded by lava flows that have gone into the ocean, creating topography all around. You’ve got shipwrecks and fish life and coral reefs formed on the granite mounds and everything else. The diving in Orchid Island is pretty good too.
[0:12:32.5] CM: That’s incredible when you tell the story of being one of their origins of life across the whole Asia Pacific region. This is the thing that comes across very strongly in the book is that obviously, Taiwan has so much to offer on the surface, as well as below the water, so that you’re getting a real cultural and natural smorgasbord and stuff. It’s not like you’re turning up diving somewhere and the food is awful. There’s nothing else to see outside your guest house.
[0:12:59.0] SP: Yes. Yes, that’s absolutely it. Every single one of those six diving areas has something different from a cultural and historical point of view that is equally fascinating. That makes a journey there, it gives it another dimension that as you say, many dive destinations don’t have.
[0:13:18.7] CM: Actually, just going back to what you’re explaining about the ancient civilization, if you like, that was one of the other things I really enjoyed in the book is when you give the brief precis of where the origin of the outrigger, which mind-blowing.
[0:13:33.6] SP: Absolutely mind-blowing.
[0:13:35.8] CM: Obviously, I’m used, like most people to seeing outrigger boats in the Philippines obviously, but also in Indonesia. They are the way of life. They are the default form of transport in those countries when you get out into the island. It was crazy to read that it had originated in Taiwan and then spread right across the ocean on there, which is also presumably, precisely how all the exploration happened that you were just describing.
[0:14:00.5] SP: Yes, exactly. The fact that it wasn’t just developed in what is now Taiwan thousands of years ago, but it was developed by a very few people, possibly one village, maybe several villages. They didn’t tell nobody else. Once they got this technology that permitted them to travel as if only one country on earth developed spaceships or space technology and off they went, without telling anybody else. They went off and populated other planets as the Austronesians went out and populated other islands, leaving the vast majority of the peoples that they had formerly dwelt with behind.
You have this situation, I think I talk about the languages and how every language in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific is connected, but to one family of Austronesian languages, and there are many, many families. It’s only this particular family that left and all the others stayed behind. In Taiwan now, there are no outriggers, even today. There’s no history of outriggers and nor do the languages that the Austronesian people speak in Taiwan have any word for the parts of an outrigger canoe.
[0:15:16.3] CM: Wow.
[0:15:17.0] SP: Yet, every language, every Austronesian language, right across the Indian Ocean in the Pacific has these words, but the languages and there are a number of languages that still are spoken within Taiwan, belong to the Austronesian language family, but none of them have these words. Fascinating. Fascinating.
[0:15:35.9] CM: Yeah. Absolutely remarkable. I just want to swing back to talking about the Penghu archipelago. You were saying about it’s a marine protected area. That essentially means it’s a similar concept to what we see in Indonesia around the Misool Eco Resort, where it’s a no-take zone, and so outside of that area, fishermen can do what they like. Because it’s been a no-take zone, it’s repopulated the general fish stocks, and so now there’s more fish for everybody and more fish for the fishermen. Would that be a decent summary?
[0:16:09.1] SP: Yes. That’s exactly what happened. That’s quite an achievement, because they’ve managed to get everybody to buy into the concept. The fishermen originally, they weren’t keen on the idea at all. They saw people stopping them making a living. But somehow, they were convinced to just wait and see. And fortunately, the change happened quite quickly and they saw that this had benefited fish life as you say, both within the marine part, the no-take zone and outside.
[0:16:36.3] CM: Yeah. Also, you do talk about in the Penghu archipelago, you had what you considered to be your greatest, or certainly most favorite dive, which is at Wolf East.
[0:16:48.1] SP: Yes.
[0:16:49.1] CM: Can you explain a bit like that, because it sounds terrifying to me.
[0:16:52.6] SP: Well, yes, it is. The thing and I describe it as a wild rollercoaster ride, which is how it is. If you think of some of the best dives in Indonesia, they are similar to that. The currents that we found nothing in our months doing the research for this book that was as strong as the currents that we’ve encountered in Komodo in Raja Ampat and places like that. As we know in Raja Ampat and Komodo, the best dives are the ones where you have the current running. The better the current, you catch it at the right point, the more fish you have and the better the dive.
It’s all to do with how its run, a good liveaboard, a good dive guide will take you on a dive where there’s a big current running and give you a terrific time and you won’t feel the fear at all, but dropping on your own, or dropping with somebody who doesn’t know what they’re doing and it could be a very different dive.
[0:17:42.0] CM: Sure. What is it down there at Wolf East that should involve all this preparation and being ready for it, some very strong currents? What is it that makes it worth all the effort?
[0:17:51.7] SP: Barracuda. Barracuda.
[0:17:53.3] CM: Right. Yes.
[0:17:54.0] SP: They’re absolutely enormous Barracuda school, which again depending on the current positions is either huge, or several, not quite so huge schools that you can bump into during the dive. It’s fabulous. It’s the school that you do see on sites around Indonesia in particular. Even in Indonesia, it’s pretty astonishing to see. It’s a wonderful thing to see. When you consider you’re in Taiwan and the amount of fishing that’s gone on in and around the South China Sea and Taiwan Straits and everything else over hundreds of years and how much fish is taken out of the sea, the existence of a massive school like this is as I said, quite astonishing. Great to see. I didn’t expect it at all.
[0:18:35.9] CM: That’s fantastic. Moving on from there to one of the other key areas you talk about is the Hengchun Riviera. I’m pronouncing that properly. Now from the sounds of it, even though Green Island is the most famous place and Green Island is where the Taiwanese themselves go to learn to dive most of the time, this area, Hengchun, sounds like essentially the most accessible southern diving. Would that be right?
[0:19:02.3] SP: Yes, absolutely right. Again, if you had a few days, you just wanted to go maybe you’re on a family holiday and you wanted to go somewhere where you could go diving and there’d be a nice beach for the family to go on some resorts and plenty of cultures, some good food and everything else, then Hengchun Kenting, that part of the island would be the place to choose, because everything’s very well set up. The diving is 20 minutes out of the port. It’s good diving. The water’s nice and warm and clear. It’s not wild and wooly. The sites are well marked. There’s bouys on the sites. The dive boats know them very well. Plenty of fish to see. Yes, terrific. A great place for a dive holiday.
If you were living in Bangkok or Hong Kong or something and you want to go to Taiwan for a dive holiday over Chinese New Year, or Easter, or something like that, then yes, fly into Kaohsiung and get picked up by the dive center, or take the bus down to Hengchun and that would be a terrific thing to do.
[0:19:58.6] CM: Awesome. Yes, you mentioned a nudibranch whose name I cannot pronounce, that’s become the mascot of Hengchun, the Glaucus Marginatus. Marginatus?
[0:20:08.2] SP: That’s it. That’s it. Glaucus Marginatus. Beautiful, but they’re organic. The fact that it’s become a symbol of Hengchun Kenting is because storms have sometimes brought groups of these things into shore and dashed them on the rocks. They’re found in intertidal pools. When the next high tide comes, they’re swept out and gone again. They exist for a very brief moment in time and what seems to happen is they arrive, somebody spots them. Maybe a dive guide takes his group there and spots them. Word gets around very quickly, all the photographers descend on the area to get their pictures and everything else. Then the next day, they’re gone. This of course, adds to their attraction. It’s the Taiwan equivalent of the psychedelic frog fish. Its arrival and disappearance is part of the mystique part of the mythology.
[0:21:04.0] CM: Also crucially, if you’re a foreign tourist turning up, you’re selling not going to be guaranteed to better see it any time you turn up by you. It’s just really going to be the luck of the drawer if you were there at the right time.
[0:21:14.0] SP: Yes, exactly. If you’re there, you’ll know, because it’s what everybody’s focus will be on.
[0:21:22.1] CM: Yes. That’s great. It’s interesting, isn’t it, how animals that become their mascot, but and actually there all the time. That actually brings me back to something you raised earlier is that scuba in Taiwan is in general, still in its infancy. It’s still a very young sport amongst the Taiwanese.
[0:21:39.5] SP: Very much.
[0:21:40.6] CM: Also though, I mean, already we can see it’s quite developed. I mean, there’s some fantastic photos in the book by your Taiwanese photographer.
[0:21:47.8] SP: Yes.
[0:21:48.6] CM: What’s his name?
[0:21:49.4] SP: Kyo Liu. He joined us for the trip and spent the month traveling around Taiwan with us. He’s exactly what you want from an underwater photographer, because he wasn’t just a diver who takes pictures, his background is in photography. He was originally a wedding photographer and then he worked for car magazines and taking motorsport pictures. Then he got into diving and decided that underwater photography would be his thing. Canned everything else and went into underwater photography. Now he teaches in Taiwan and he is superb.
We have a funny story, now I don’t take underwater photographs myself, but I work with a number of photographers. Sometimes when their models aren’t there and I’m the closest diver, then I’m called him to do the modeling. In my books in general, I’d quite like to have underwater pictures with divers in them. I told Kyo this before the first dive we did. I said, “Sometimes if I see you in a position, I think I’m somewhere which make a good shot.” I said, “I’ll just sit there while and then you can take pictures.” He said, “Yeah, okay. That’s fine.”
We’re on our first dive and we’re on a pinnacle of the north of Taipei. I see him below and I think, “Well, the sun’s behind me and this is very colorful, this little pinnacle that I’m sitting on.” He looked up and I waved at him and he looked up and looked at me and pushed the camera in my direction, as if to see is that a shot or whatever. Then three, four seconds later, he just carried on swimming. I thought, “Well, obviously it wasn’t a shot,” because I’m used to the photographer then getting me to pose, or moving me up and down or whatever.
After the dive, we went for dumplings and I said to him, “Obviously, you know that shot and referred to where I posed.” He said, “Ooh, I got it.” Flicked through his camera and there it was. He had a succession of half-a-dozen perfectly framed, perfect shots and he’d just done it. No messing around, no, “Get here, there. Oh there’s the shot, I’m off.” We got used to this after a while. He just knows what he’s doing.
[0:23:55.0] CM: Yeah. Well, I guess as well that’s a lot of hard-won experience from being a wedding photographer, because you miss your chance there and there’s hell to pay, right?
[0:24:02.9] SP: What a good point. What a good point. I hadn’t thought of that, but that’s exactly where they say, isn’t it? That’s why they say you should always get a professional wedding photographer, because your pal who says he takes pictures isn’t going to have that awareness. Yes, what a good thought. What a good thought.
[0:24:21.8] CM: It’s great obviously that Kyo was your photographer and that you were hanging out with Taiwanese and getting the local insight into how it worked.
[0:24:29.8] SP: Yes.
[0:24:30.1] CM: You mentioned in the book that obviously on Green Island, it’s quite well set up for foreign tourists to turn up. There are plenty of English speakers around and the same in Hengchun, right?
[0:24:39.7] SP: Yes.
[0:24:40.2] CM: If I was just to show up in Taipei, should I make sure I’ve booked ahead with dive shops and but they’re going to be completely happy to speak in English and briefings and stuff won’t be too much of a problem?
[0:24:53.5] SP: All the dive centers I mentioned in the book have an English language capability. Everybody I refer to and I give phone numbers and e-mail address and things like that, can take care of English-speaking travelers, English-speaking divers. I think as when you go anywhere, it’s usually a good idea to make contact in advance, so you’re on the same page. I think if you were in Taipei and thought, “Well, I’m going to go and do a days diving, or I want to do three or four days diving or whatever,” then any of the shops I mentioned would be able to cater to you.
I talk about linguistic proficiency as you travel around. Generally speaking, if you need somebody to help you translate, then pick somebody who’s young, has glasses and ideally is carrying a bag of books. The students are the best English speakers. There are more and more as time goes on, more and more Taiwanese people are learning English and they’re more international. A little bit of Mandarin gets you a long way, but that’s not something most people have.
Yeah, as far as the dive centers I mentioned, in particular, I’ll give an example, the Taiwan Dive Center in Hengchun, who were the people who really put this trip together. They were the ones who if you took the ball we threw at them and ran with it, they put everything together. They and a couple of other places that I mentioned in the book have this full service diving mentality that you see in Thailand and in Bali, someplace in the Philippines, where the dive industry is mature. Places like this have this attitude.
No matter what level of need you have, they’ll arrange it. If you’re in Taipei and you want to have a private car to take you down to Hengchun, then that can be done. If you want somebody to buy you the train tickets and the bus ticket and give you the itinerary to get down there on your own, then that can be done too. That level of dive tourism does exist. It’s not everywhere, but I particularly chose for the recommended dive centers in the book, places that could offer this level of service.
[0:27:04.4] CM: Yeah, and that’s great. You very thoroughly answered my question there, because if you can just contact someone and say, “Hey, I want to do this, but I don’t know what I’m doing.” They’re like, “No, problem. We can just sort all that out for you.” It’s just such a relief that all of those logistics are taken care of and obviously, they’ve done it before and they know the right people to talk to.
Because obviously, when you’ve talked about places like the Penghu archipelago, I mean, that’s quite daunting to get there on your own. I’m sure it would be easy in reality, you and me, when you’re just trying to plan out in your head, it’s like, oh, there’s quite a lot of variables there. If someone’s just going to lead you through and say, “It’s going to cost you this much,” it’s kinda perfect really.
[0:27:44.2] SP: Yes. I think if you want to dive outside Taipei and the Northeast, if you want to dive Hengchun, Kenting in the south, if you want to dive Xiao Liuqiu in the southwest, or if you want to dive Green Island, then you’ll have no difficulty at all finding people who will take care of all the arrangements. You could also go on your own. You could call the dive shop directly and say, “This is what I want to do.” In Penghu and to a lesser extent, Orchid Island, if you had a Mandarin speaker with you, it would be a lot easier. They’re just a little more remote. They’re just a little harder to get to. There are fewer people who speak English when you get there and they are not so used to dealing with non-Chinese speaking divers.
[0:28:30.6] CM: Sure. Yeah. That makes total sense. As long as you’re aware of that ahead time, then it’s not really an issue. Just needs more planning, or hope you can find something like Kyo to go with you.
[0:28:42.4] SP: Yes. Yeah. Ideally. Or do that, my talk in the book about a safari, to plan a safari and with a little bit of planning and the various numbers and e-mails I’ve given in the book, you could put together your own little safari and either have somebody travel around with you, or do a handover thing. The people in Taipei area for instance, put you on the train to Kaohsiung and you get off in Kaohsiung and then you’re handed to the people who are going to take you to the next destination, that kind of thing. That would be fairly straightforward to put together.
[0:29:16.8] CM: Yeah, that sounds great. Actually, so just drawing this to a close, the last question I was going to ask you about, talked about scuba still being quite young and so forth. When you get to each of these destinations, obviously the Penghu archipelago, I imagine there’s not that many people around. When you go down to Green Island or Hengchun, does it tend to be quite crowded? Do you have to pick and choose where you’re going to go?
[0:29:41.3] SP: July and August and particularly whenever there are national holidays. Again, in the book I listed their national holidays to avoid, because that’s when the whole of Taiwan hits the road and hits the beaches and hits the dive shops and you don’t really want to be around at that time. In July and August to a certain extent, it’s similar. The accommodation options are not so great. In those shoulder seasons we talked about before, April to June and September, October, you shouldn’t have any difficulty anywhere getting somewhere to stay, getting a dive boat to go out to, doing a tour, not a problem at all.
[0:30:18.5] CM: Awesome. Simon, thank you so much for talk to me about this. I mean, I’ve gone from knowing almost nothing about Taiwan, to really now wanting to go there. I think you’ve achieved your objective. Thank you so much.
[0:30:31.4] SP: Great pleasure. Great pleasure. Cheers.
[0:30:33.6] CM: Cheers.
[0:30:36.1] CM: Thanks very much for listening to the Dive Happy Podcast. You can see the show notes for this episode and browse all the other episodes at divehappy.com/podcast. You can also sign up for the Dive Happy newsletter, so you get notified when the next episode comes out. Sign up at divehappy.com/podcast. I pinky-promise, I won’t spam you.
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- #20: Diving Japan
- #19: Diving HTMS Chang And Alhambra Rock
- #18: Diving The WW2 Shipwrecks Of Coron
- #17: Diving Lembongan
- #16: Diving Romblon: the Philippines’ Secret Super Macro Paradise
- #15: Triton Bay Diving 2020
- #14: Dream Job: Liveaboard Cruise Director
- #13: Diving Triton Bay
- #12: Diving Tubbataha Reef
- #11: Diving Yap
- #10: Diving Truk Lagoon
- #09: Diving Sogod Bay
- #08: Misool Eco Resort
- #07: Diving Palau
- #06: The Manta Rays Of Myanmar’s Black Rock
- #05: Diving Myanmar
- #04: Diving Bali
- #03: Diving Cenderawasih Bay
- #02: Diving Komodo
- #01: Diving Raja Ampat
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