This day, we spent all our time visiting Kinmen Island. We first went hunting for breakfast:
noodles
We started with a local village that was facing towards China, so they had underground tunnels to get around without being killed by shells.
old phone switch
the tunnel wasn't lost on all
We continued around the island:
bunker view
the lovely chinese come there with huge boats to illegally take all the sand
more long underground tunnels to avoid artillery
We then went to checkout another traditional village built by a single family:
Next was a big underground complex with huge tunnels and artillery to fire back at the Chinese. The park rangers did a mock up firing presentation for us, quite entertaining :)
This museum did a good job explaining what the battles over these insignificant islands were all about, as in the end, they were just another front of the cold war. The US while not fighting directly gave a lot of help to Taiwan with equipment to stop the spread of communism. In turn, the Taiwanese fought bravely against a superior attacker. The worst part is that MAo Zedong apparently started these attacks against the ROC (Taiwan) to distract its own people trying to create a revolution. Sigh...
to allow safer resupply, they built many tunnels and used amphibious vehicles to hide in the rocks to unload supplies
this is what the Chinese did to anything reachable above ground
they had huge loudspeakers to disuade the chinese from further attacks against mostly their own
the chinese shot so many shells at the ROC that the locals started making knifes with the metal
Turns out the Chinese even tried to debark on the island like Normandie, except did it badly and encountered Taiwanese tanks (from the US) and defense weaponry that allowed the Taiwanese to stop the attack (battle of Guningtou). This is why the Chinese then just started shooting shells at them by the hundreds of thousands instead of trying to invade the island again. Turns out neither worked:
the people and building casulaties were heavy though
We also saw some nice parks and birds during the day:
By sunset time, we went to a beach to enjoy the view:
sunset over tanks, romantic :)
China in the background
And finished the day by doing a night tour of downtown:
