Budai

We came to Budai on the recommendation of a Chiayi city guesthouse owner who said, with total confidence, that we’d never had oysters until we’d had them here. She wasn’t exaggerating by much. Budai’s harbor sits on a stretch of coast so shallow and nutrient-rich that oyster farming has been the region’s backbone for generations, and the racks of them — black bamboo poles strung with ropes of shells — stretch out from shore in grids that from a distance look almost agricultural, like rows of a crop planted in water.

The Harbor Market

The fish market near Budai’s harbor runs a brisk, unglamorous business early each morning, boats coming in low with their catch, buyers haggling in a Taiwanese dialect too fast for either of us to follow. By midday it slows into a scatter of seafood stalls selling oysters shucked to order, grilled over charcoal with a slick of garlic and soy, and a local specialty of oyster omelet that put Tainan’s version — which I’d been loudly praising for days — to a genuine test. Lia conceded, grudgingly, that Budai’s might be better.

Salt Flats and Sunset

South of the harbor, the coastline flattens into old salt evaporation ponds, some abandoned, some still catching the tide in thin mirrored sheets. We rode bicycles out along the embankments in the late afternoon and watched the sun drop toward the Taiwan Strait, the water in the shallow pans turning first pink, then a deep rust-orange that reflected off wet mud in a way that made the whole landscape look lit from below. A few egrets picked through the shallows, entirely unbothered by us.

There’s a small ferry from Budai out to Penghu, which is how most travelers pass through without stopping. That’s a mistake. The town itself, unglamorous and working, is worth an afternoon on its own terms.

When to go: Late afternoon into evening for the salt flat sunset, any season, though the oyster harvest is at its best from October through the following spring. Avoid midday in summer, when the flats offer zero shade and the heat is unrelenting.