Whe we woke up this morning the rain had stopped but the sky was still grey. That didn’t matter to us since the goal of the day was to see several of the underground bunkers and tunnels that are no longer in use by the military. The first one was tunnel 88 which used to be for tanks but now acts as a storage place for the local wine. My camera doesn’t capture smells but if it did you could get a whiff of the rather strong wine odor in there.

We thought the wine tunnel would take a bit more time than it did so we ended up with a bit of extra time which we spent on random exploration in the vicinity. Turns out there are quite a lot of patriotic landmarks on Matsu, it is one of few places in Taiwan (or perhaps I should say Republic of China) that has a Chiang Kai Shek statue in a public place.

  • Chiang Kai Shek memorial
  • Statue of the man himself
  • Statue of soldiers in battle
  • The text is a slogan written by Chiang Kai Shek himself, it says “Always on alert”

After lunch we went to the main attraction of the island, the Beihai tunnel. It is similar to the one we saw yesterday; the main difference between them is that this one always has water inside. We took a short walk along the edge of the water, then rented a canoe and paddled around for a bit which is cool; it’s not every day you can go paddling underground.

Right next to the tunnel was a rather large bunker complex so we explored that one too. They had several cannons ready to fire at incoming ships, just too bad part of it was being repaired.

Because we were too eager to get out in the morning, we never got to see that much of the village where we lived, so after seeing the bunker we headed back there. We wandered around a bit among some abandoned old stone houses up on the cliffs then found a ledge where we sat down and simply relaxed, our backs against the sun warm stone.

When we felt like getting up from our resting spot, we went searching for a few more bunkers and eventually ended up on a small beach where I found a bunker to explore while Yini sat contemplating the waves.

When I got out from there we moved our luggage to the new hotel for the night then went out for a bite to eat. After relaxing in our hotel for a bit we went out in search of the illusive Blue Tears and this time, we were lucky enough to find them.

Just like fireflies it’s pretty hard to get a good photo but It’s like a faint greenish blue light that flows with the swell of the waves, froths as the water gets dashed against the rocks then spreads out in little blinking wavelets. I think I can speak for both Yini and me when I say Matsu is worth a visit just for the Blue Tears.

Eventually I did figure out how to get some decent shots of it, so here goes, enjoy:

  • Early trial is a bit too red
  • Some very faint flashes of blue, looks nice
  • Perhaps a bit too bright
  • There we go
  • Spectacular!