The best way to hike – in water.
11 Jul 2010 Leave a Comment
Jessica’s been wanting to river trace, which is just hiking or tracing the route of a river, for a while now and yesterday we finally did it after a lengthy departure in which I was in a bad bad mood and seemed to exist to frustrate Jessica. But she weathered the Josh storm and we went and bought special river tracing shoes (kind of like scuba diving booties but with felt bottoms which help to grip the rocks) and I’m glad we did because they were awesome. I could jump onto slippery rocks and not slip. A couple of times I almost fell but never did. I felt like an amphibian. I don’t know why but I love jumping around on rocks in the water. When I was a kid my parents went to look at some property where they have their house now and I just naturally gravitated down toward the little creek and jumped in and played in the mud for a while. River tracing made me feel kind of at home.
We had to find this village called Cheng gong not to far south of Taipei on the way to Wulai. I thought it might be hard to find so I voted for us to just take a taxi out there thinking the taxi driver would know exactly what we were talking about. Well, he didn’t of course. I think it’s the only time we haven’t been able to somehow communicate or destination to a taxi driver. He spoke no English so we used our limited Chinese which was kind of fun and kind of ineffective. We ended up driving around Xindian for about 15 minutes because he thought we were looking for a street name cheng gong there. When he realized that was not the case we went back the MRT station and long story (calls to tourist information centers) short we just got out paid him 130 nt for not taking us anywhere and took the bus. The bus was crowded and we couldn’t understand the stop names very well. We’d thought we missed it and were just going to get out and randomly intersect the river and just hike around when the bus driver immediately called “Cheng Gong.” It was easy from there, a little rainy but these nice guys getting drunk at the bus stop gave us an umbrella. They said, “bye bye” to us when we came back about four hours later to go back to town too. River tracing was great. We just took our time walking around, stopped a few times to swim in some of the deeper pools and at one point I found a 15 or so foot ledge to jump off of into the water.
Today we went back up the tianmu trail which is right near our apartment for a hike and we saw these macaques. It was a happy moment because we’ve been hoping to see some kind of primate in the wild since we’ve been in Taiwan and in all of the places we’ve hiked we haven’t seen any sign of them. I was thinking we probably just wouldn’t see any and it was a real bummer but now we have and it is anit-bummer. It is awesome.
