Sheding Nature Park

Sheding sits just a few minutes up the hill from Kenting’s main strip, and almost nobody we met on the peninsula had actually gone in. Which is baffling, because it might be the strangest terrain I walked in all of Taiwan — a forest reserve built directly on top of an ancient uplifted coral reef, the limestone still riddled with the pockmarks and ridges of something that used to be underwater.

Walking on Old Reef

The main trail loops through what’s officially called a “geological education area,” a phrase that undersells how bizarre it actually looks. Coral limestone erupts through the forest floor in jagged plates, some of it hollowed into small caves you can duck into, all of it covered in a skin of moss and root systems that have had centuries to work their way into the cracks. I kept running my hand along the rock, half expecting it to still feel like something from the sea. Millions of years of tectonic uplift did this, pushing what was once a reef bed above the waterline and leaving the forest to slowly colonize it.

The Macaques Own This Place

The Formosan rock macaques are the other reason to come. A troop crossed the path ahead of us within ten minutes of entering, entirely unbothered, a mother carrying an infant that clung to her stomach while she picked through leaf litter. The rangers post signs everywhere warning you not to make eye contact or carry visible food, advice we took seriously after watching one macaque casually lift a plastic bag straight out of a hiker’s daypack a few meters away. Lia found it more entertaining than alarming. I found it a useful reminder that this is genuinely their territory, not a managed wildlife exhibit.

There’s a viewpoint near the top of the loop that opens onto the Hengchun Peninsula and, on a clear day, the Pacific beyond it — a good place to catch your breath after picking through the karst terrain, which is rougher underfoot than it looks from the trailhead.

When to go: Morning, right after the park opens, when the macaques are most active and the heat hasn’t built up under the canopy. Wear real shoes — the limestone is sharp and uneven.