“There's a plastic unicorn float in the pool, and two grown women have been trying to mount it for twenty minutes, laughing so hard the sound carries across the courtyard.”

The bus from Zuoying HSR station takes about two hours, and somewhere past Fangliao the road starts hugging the coast in a way that makes your phone slide off your lap every third turn. You know you're getting close to Kenting when the betel nut stands give way to surf shops and the air turns thick and salty. Nanwan Road is the kind of strip that exists in every beach town on earth — scooter rental places, grilled squid vendors, a 7-Eleven doing more business than any of them — but then you look left and there's a building covered in ornamental arches and zellige tilework, and your cab driver doesn't even blink. He's seen it before. You haven't.

Checheng Township sits at the bottom of Taiwan, the kind of place people from Taipei and Kaohsiung escape to when the humidity in the city becomes personal. The beaches here face the Philippine Sea and the Taiwan Strait simultaneously, depending on which direction you walk. Nanwan — South Bay — is a ten-minute stroll from the hotel, and the surf breaks are good enough that you'll see boards strapped to scooters at every intersection. The local night market sets up along Kenting Main Street on weekends, and the grilled corn alone is worth the walk.

A riad on the Hengchun Peninsula

The Amanda Hotel doesn't ease you in. You walk through the entrance and the entire visual register shifts — carved plaster walls, mosaic fountains, keyhole archways, lanterns throwing warm light onto surfaces painted in deep terracotta and cobalt. It's a Moroccan riad, or at least someone's deeply committed interpretation of one, dropped onto the southern tip of Taiwan. The effect should be absurd. It isn't. The commitment is too total for irony. Every corridor, every stairwell, every bathroom tile has been thought about, and the result is a place that feels less like a theme hotel and more like a building that simply decided it was in Marrakech and dared you to argue.

The staff meet you at the door and immediately offer to take your photo — not in a performative way, but with the genuine enthusiasm of people who know their building photographs well and want you to have proof you were here. They walk you through the property like it's their home, pointing out the rooftop terrace, the pool area, the courtyard where breakfast happens. They mention the djellabas — traditional Moroccan robes — that guests can borrow for photos. It's a detail that could tip into kitsch, but the way it's offered, casually, like lending someone a jacket, keeps it on the right side.

The rooms carry the aesthetic through without flinching. Carved wooden headboards, patterned textiles, arched doorways that frame the bed like a painting. The balcony, if you get a room with one, looks out toward the hills behind the coast rather than the ocean — which is actually better at night, when the mountains go black against a sky that's still faintly purple. You can hear scooters on Nanwan Road, but they thin out by eleven. By midnight it's mostly geckos and the low hum of the pool filter.

“The building decided it was in Marrakech and dared you to argue. Nobody has won that argument yet.”

The pool is the social center, small enough that strangers become acquaintances within an hour. There's a plastic unicorn float that appears to be intended for children but is used exclusively by adults, with varying degrees of success and dignity. The water is warm. The surrounding courtyard has enough loungers and shade to spend a full afternoon doing nothing, which is the correct amount of activity for Kenting in July. I should mention the WiFi holds up in the rooms but gets unreliable by the pool — whether this is a flaw or a feature depends on what you're running from.

Breakfast is served in the courtyard, and while it leans toward a standard Taiwanese hotel spread — congee, pickled vegetables, toast, eggs — eating it under Moorish arches with a fountain trickling nearby does something to the experience. The coffee is instant, which is honest and fine. If you need real coffee, there's a small café two blocks south on Nanwan Road called Café Voyage that pulls decent espresso and has outdoor seating facing the ocean. The walk takes four minutes. Everything in Kenting takes four minutes.

Walking out into the salt air

Leaving in the morning, Nanwan Road looks different than it did arriving. The squid vendors aren't set up yet. A woman is hosing down the sidewalk outside a surf shop, and the wet concrete catches the early light in a way that makes the whole street look freshly made. You notice the mountains more — the Hengchun Peninsula hills rising green and sudden behind the low commercial strip. A bus heading back to Zuoying stops at the corner near the 7-Eleven. It runs roughly every thirty minutes before noon. The driver has the radio on, something in Taiwanese that sounds like a morning talk show. The ocean is behind you now, but you can still smell it.

Rooms at Amanda Hotel start around $95 on weeknights and climb toward $190 on summer weekends — what that buys you is a place where the architecture argues with the geography and somehow both win, plus a pool unicorn that has humbled better riders than you.