Taroko Gorge
19 Apr 2010 Leave a Comment
Jessica and I went to Taroko Gorge on the weekend. Originally, it was to be Green Island as we’ve been wanting to go camping. But it was too hard to figure out the details of booking a Ferry at the right time and getting a campsite at the last minute, much to our fortune. Plan B, turned out to be an A plus. Taroko is incredible, a huge chasm we were lucky enough to be able to drive through on a scooter, whipping around the cliff highway like the wind, having the entire panorama of an almost spiritual scenery at a moments turn of the neck. I almost believe we’re genetically designed to react with reverence in such sights of sheer rock faces and formations of such mass and natural beauty.
On the scooter:
I would say we were lucky to get one as neither Jessica nor I are licensed, but everyone (especially tourists) drives without a liscense here, especially in the Gorge where the best way to view and travel to trails is on scooter. The hostel attendant, at the Formosan backpackers hostel we stayed in in the town of Hualien, gave us directions to a scooter rental place called “Pony.” We never found Pony but she gave us the card of another rental place with an unsuccessful search too but it did place us at the spot in the road we needed to be as a man came out of a shop, asked if we needed help, and then became our advocate on renting a scooter. He told us, “very dangerous, not like in America.” I guess motorbikes aren’t dangerous in America.
I took his warning seriously but have had the fortune of growing up in the middle of Michigan so I new my way around any kind of minibike, motorcycle thing you could throw in front of me. And, these scooters are seriously idiot proof, they have electric starters, and are automatics. All one has to do is gas and brake. We filled it up for a hundred twenty NT ($4 U.S.), which was all the gas we needed for the entire weekend and were off. Getting used to the traffic was the hardest part but it’s pretty intuitive once you get a feel for it. There’s bike and scooter lanes and most people watch out for everyone else with the expectation that you watch out for them. There’s hardly any road rage as people pulling out in front of one another is common and expected. You just stop and wait.
-Taroko
We didn’t do as much hiking as we wanted because, we think, most trails were closed due to the damage caused by the previous typhoon. There were signs everywhere warning of falling rocks. We even saw a “watch out for venomous snakes” sign. Needless to say there’s no better way of putting a person on alert than nailing in a “watch out for venomous snakes” sign. We hung out in a gazebo atop a peninsula rock cliff for a bit and walked part way up to a Buddhist temple to a Guanyin statue that was pretty and nice but mostly we just drove through soaking it up.
Sun Moon Lake, Swimming, Sunburn
10 Apr 2010 Leave a Comment
Well I’m still here in Taipei. There’s still two of us. I’m just not blogging much. So much has happened in the past few months too. It’s too much to blog about in detail. I’ll try to recap. Last weekend was tomb sweeping weekend, really, for people to go and honor dead relatives by cleaning their graves, which are little round bricked tombs on the sides of mountains. They’ve got to be some of the most beautiful grave yards in the world. They also offer food to the dead and then make feasts out of it. But, since we don’t know any dead people in Taiwan, we had a three day weekend. Jessica’s mom Ellen and her friend Beth were visiting so we all had the chance to take an excursion down country to see Sun Moon Lake. There’s no swimming in Sun Moon Lake, which was really frustrating, except on one day a year when there is a race across. It’s a good thing our hotel had a pool even if it was only three feet deep. We had a boat tour that took us to an island and at first we thought we had an hour to poke around but then the fella who was our captain of sorts who nabbed us off the streets with the lure of only charging us as children, a promise he fulfilled and saved us probably ten U.S. dollars, eventually said we had ten minutes so we walked up a trail, listened to some musicians set up at the entrance to the island and then got back on the boat. We did stop at another little area with more musicians for about thirty five minutes. Oh, we went to a brewery in Puli too. The best part was a drunk simulator that consisted of psychedelic wallpaper and a slightly slanted floor and at the entrance was a notice to anyone with a heart condition not to enter. We were tempted to stay inside and tell everyone who entered, “I love you man.”
The next day we visited a Buddhist monastery, called Cheng Tai Chun, (I think) near Puli, the town we stayed the night in, with tons of statues of Bodhisattvas and Buddhas. It was really big. I actually forgot my camera that day so I don’t have any pictures. But Jessica does. And her blog is jamming.
Then, back in Taipei, we took the gondola from the Taipei Zoo MRT station out to the tea drinking area of maokong. I highly recommend it even though a lot of people are leery after the collapse of one of the support pylons during a mud slide during it’s initial opening. But, everything felt more than safe to me. A smooth and beautiful ride. Cheap too and right in Taipei’s back yard.
Today, Jessica and I rode the 1602 bus out to Pinglin. This is something that we’ve been trying to do for a long long time. Since we first got here. It was really fun. We found a cool stairway that led up to a gold statue of Guanyin (Kwaiyin) the famous Boddhisattva then we walked around on some roads by the river, looking for a place to swim for awhile, kind of a long while. We were initially looking for a bike rental place that we thought would help us traverse the riverside more quickly to help find a swimming hole but then we just found suitable access. There was a Taiwanese family eating lunch by the river so I had to maneuver behind some rocks to change into my suit. But I made it into the water. It was cool refreshing river water, on a hot day. The kids from the family loved watching me frolicking on the slippery rocks. One of the kids starting singing “Sorry Sorry,” a Korean pop song to me when I got out too. Cute kids. Some of the rocks were so big that with the current I managed to sort of surf on them but then I ran into a small rapids and had to crash into a rock to keep myself from being sucked into en even stronger current. So my knee has a bit of a bruise and I have a horrible sun burn. I feel like I’m twelve again, except without the cuts on my feet from the hay fields.
