A jaunt along the coast of southern Chiayi and northern Tainan

Much more worth the time is the Taiwan Salt Museum, which stands beside the road near the salt mountain, in a modernistic new building designed to represent a huge pile of salt. The slightly steep admission fee (NT$150 for adults) may put some off, but it's worth paying up as it's an impressive achievement, somehow managing to make the subject of salt far more interesting than I ever knew, although (alas!) most of the exhibits are labeled only in Chinese.

Near the entrance is a gift shop selling everything you can imagine related to salt (and maybe a few things you never imagined!) Try the walnut and almond salty ice cream, which actually tastes very good!

To get a feel for what's entailed in making salt by hand, however, the best place in the area to go is to Jingzijiaou Uaban Salt Fields (井子腳瓦盤鹽田), signposted off the main route 17 a couple of kilometers north of Chigu, just south of the town of Beimen (北門). This place is well away from the tourist crowds of Chigu, and on our visit one fine sunny Saturday in early April, with the short salt harvesting season at its height, we were the only visitors.

Here lies a compact series of irregularly shaped pools, their floors covered in a mosaic of little stones laid, like crazy paving, to prevent the salt mixing with the ground underneath. Some are still filled with seawater (brought in from the sea via a system of ditches with water gates) placidly mirroring the blue sky above, while the water in others has already evaporated completely under the powerful southern sun, and the remaining layer of snow-white salt is swept up into small pyramids, one in the center of each pool, ready to be dug up and piled in huge mounds beside the pools by a solitary lady and her wheelbarrow.

Signboards, happily in English as well as Chinese, explain the surprisingly complicated process of extracting salt from seawater by evaporation: from letting seawater water into the first (and lowest) evaporation ponds until, ten ponds later, the crystallized salt is dug out, takes over two weeks during the main salt-extracting season (March to May), although the process is begun afresh every three days or so.

Sounds like a lot of work to produce a pack of salt that costs so little at the local supermarket, but then, the info board informs us, each crystallization pond here (and there are 98 in all) can produce 250 to 350 kilograms of salt every three days!

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