It’s Mid-Autumn Moon Festival today, one of the most important festivals of the year, celebrated with barbecues and moon-gazing, visits home and moon cakes. We even have a day off on Monday to make the most of it all. Yippee!

It’s also the weekend of Taiwan’s annual North Coast Kite Festival at Baishawan Beach 白沙灣 just a mile or so up the road from here. Must-go!

Ah yes, and to top it all, we have a typhoon on the way! Hopefully the last of the season. Typhoons mean rain and wind, and certainly no moon-gazing, but the wind is of course ideal for kites and the grey skies mean it’s a very pleasant temperature…

So this was the scene yesterday afternoon at Baishawan – millions of people and zillions of kites. You can just spot the lighthouse at the northern tip of Taiwan in the far distance….

A great atmosphere! The beach was cordoned off, and the whole area dedicated to kite flying and kite-surfing displays. Beautiful! The photos are, well, a bit grey, but hey those kites were huge and pretty amazing!