Swim across Sun-Moon lake

This is the 3rd or 4th time I joined this event - swimming across the lake in the mountain at center of Taiwan.  The distance is 3.3km, not a great length, your sense of distance is distorted in open water.  It feels much shorter!

Jon and I were active swimmer - we stop hiking in the summer but go to the beach almost every weekend instead.  We normally do 1 or 1.5km in the pool or an hour swim in the sea.  The distance looks pretty far (when you are standing on one end looking over), but it was actually quite enjoyable.  The water is clean and cool - so different from the sea, the view is great the only problem is it is extremely crowded.  Imagine 30,000 people try to get into the water, it takes hours to queue.  Everyone is given the fluorescent orange swimming cap for safety reason, I guess the life guard can see you easily, so you see the swimming channel is filled with the bright orange dots from one end all the way to the other.

There are so many people and we have to wear the a buoy (another silly safety regulation only in Taiwan), the getting ahead swimming past all other fellow swimmers is just like playing rugby.  There is no way we get into the rhythm and swim fast, we had to constantly push and kick people away to move ahead.  At the end we got really fed up with this and decide not to get ahead anymore. Instead we stopped at every stop on the left to eat a piece of chocolate- there is a raft every 50 meters, serving food.  We were riding on the buoy, resting my chin and paddling forward slowly. 
The swim was uneventful - very easy and relaxing, it was the getting out of the mountain with 30,000 people is exhausting, we were trapped in the bus for 6 hours for a 3 hour journey, then 2 hour train back to Taipei and 1 hour to home.

After the long trip back home, both Jon and I felt that our chins are sore - like allergic reaction.  It took us a while to realize it was caused by our slow swimming at the end, we rub our chins against the buoys for too long.