Bali District
"Everyone crosses the river to Danshui for the view. Almost no one looks back at Bali, which is exactly why we liked it."
A quiet riverside district facing Danshui across the water, built around a prehistoric museum, mangrove wetlands, and a bike path that turns a ferry crossing into an afternoon.
We’d spent the previous afternoon in Danshui doing what everyone does in Danshui — eating along the old street, watching the sunset from the fort — and it was Lia who noticed, studying the map on the ferry dock, that the quiet, half-wooded riverbank directly across the water had a name and, apparently, its own attractions. We bought two tickets on the small passenger ferry mostly out of curiosity.
A Museum Built Around 5,500 Years of People
Bali’s main draw is the Shihsanhang Museum of Archaeology, built on the site of a Neolithic settlement excavated in the 1950s after a fisherman noticed old pottery shards eroding out of the riverbank. The museum itself is a striking piece of modern architecture — angular concrete, deliberately rusted steel — built directly over the excavation site, with glass floor panels in places that let you look straight down at exposed burial urns and postholes from a culture that fished this same river five and a half thousand years before either of us was born.
I spent longer than expected in front of a reconstructed burial display, struck by the ordinariness of the grave goods — shell bracelets, a few clay pots, nothing ceremonial or grand — a reminder that the people who lived on this riverbank were not so different from anyone eating dinner on it tonight.
Mangroves, Bicycles, and a River Seen from the Other Side
From the museum, a riverside path runs through the Bali Left Bank wetlands, a stretch of protected mangrove where egrets stalk the mudflats at low tide. We rented bicycles from a stand near the ferry pier and rode the path for nearly two hours, stopping periodically to watch fiddler crabs disappear into their burrows and, at one long straight stretch, to look back across the water at Danshui’s old town and Fort San Domingo — the same view we’d stood inside of the day before, now reversed.
Lia pointed out that we’d photographed Danshui from Danshui and now Danshui from Bali, and asked, not unreasonably, whether this counted as visiting the same place twice or two different ones. I still don’t have a good answer, but Bali earned its own entry regardless.
When to go: Spring through autumn for cycling and birdwatching in the wetlands, avoiding the muddiest days after heavy rain. The ferry across from Danshui runs year-round and takes under fifteen minutes, making Bali an easy half-day add-on to any Danshui visit.