Weather Changes

It's a strange thing - the weather in Taiwan. The weather forecast for all of the southern counties (Chiayi, Tainan, Kaohsiung and Pingtung) has been grey and overcast all week, yet the weather has been superb here in Tainan.

So yesterday I drove up to Chiayi to photo the Renyi Tan reservoir (仁義潭水庫), and disapointingly, the skies were in fact all grey and miserable - whereas they were apparently open and blue all day in Tainan according to friends. Compare and contrast, first the southern end of Tseng-wen reservoir (曾文水庫) looking north-eastwards (taken on wednesday):


Glorious. Notice the clouds to the north (i.e. Chiayi) in that picture and the relative blue in the south. And now the eastern end (looking northwestards) of Renyi Tan reservoir in Chiayi yesterday:


Appalling. The dismal skies in Chiayi meant that I struggled to get anything even half-decent; which meant using the dull conditions as a backdrop for a portrait shot of some random clutter in the foreground.


And even that is ... dull. My pictures at Tseng-wen were much better simply because of the difference in the weather. I'll use some of them in a new essay I'm writing on Taiwan's reservoirs. On my way home, I stopped on a bridge over the Tseng-wen river to get some pictures of the cliff erosion and while I was at it, at the risk of having my camera blown off by a stray gust of wind, I also managed a decent shot of myself: