Isle of my Isle Part 1: War

Sorry for the long delay in blog posts. Between the travel and being exhausted every night I haven't had a good opportunity to get a few good posts in. Here it is at last for your enjoyment.

We undertook a small adventure to an island owned by Taiwan called Kinmen.

As you can see it is right off the coast of China. You can see the shores of China from the island itself quite easily, especially from little Kinmen. Those of you who are more familiar with Chinese-Taiwanese relations will probably wonder how this ever worked in the past. The answer is it didn't, it was the boxing ring for the 2 nations and witnessed two major battles. The U.S. was even involved in these battles it in a side role as we had an entire fleet stationed between the countries. I won't get too heavily bogged down in history though and will continue on about our trip there but if anyone is interested about the battles I'll throw in a wikipedia link. They are of interest for history buffs or military buffs since the U.S. came close to using nuclear weapons and the first AA missles were used.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Taiwan_Strait_Crisis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Taiwan_Strait_Crisis


The huge military background is evident across Kinmen and little Kinmen and that is a major part of the tourist attraction there. The following pictures show one of the remnants, Tunnels dug straight from the ocean into the solid granite mountains to hide ships from spies and artillery shells.

 

The next couple of pictures show a General's outpost and then a tunnel from a bunker. The tunnels stretch for what I would guess would be a few miles total. It's a complete maze down there in some areas. It was also weird seeing all these military structures as 2 of my uncles served in the military on this island digging and building the same type of structures you see here.