Have you ever been 10 seconds late for that train, which made you 10 minutes late for that bus, which made you 30 minutes late to that appointment at work that could have generated a sizable amount of business? Well that's about how our Taiwan trip played out. We would arrive at Location A just in time for plans to fall through, thus sending us to Location B only to find ourselves facing the same situation. All of this along with the landslides, earthquake and sister typhoons heading straight for Taiwan, one would assume it was a trip from hell. Actually...not at all. Luckily my travel partner is beautiful, fun-loving and can roll with the punches better than Muhammad Ali...
October 3:
1:53 A.M. - Our plane touched down in Taipei. Since this would be one of my only "lengthy" breaks (4 days) over the next year we opted for an early arrival where we could spend the night exploring this "24-hour city" instead of sleeping in a comfortable bed. Taipei is the Asia location for book publishing, so they have massive 24-hour book stores. We spent a while looking through books before heading for some late night 7-11 bagels and finally finding ourselves engulfed in some intense games of darts at the Double Bull dart bar.
At 7:30 A.M. we boarded the high-speed train heading 1 1/2 hours south to Chiayi, Taiwan. Our original plan was to take a 3 1/2 hour train from the small city to the beautiful, breath-taking A Li Mountain, but since the recent typhoon put a 2-year halt on the railways we had heard that there should be a number of buses that made the trek on a daily basis. The sunsets at A Li Mountain are supposed to be amazing...supposedly, we never found out for sure, for this was the first of our many obstacles on the trips. Upon arrival we stopped in a travel agent to find out where the buses were only to find out that the buses, too, were out of commission. Our only option: an expensive cab ride. Seeing as we had traveled all this way and there was nothing else in the area we decided to bite the bullet and get in the cab...WOW, what a ride! Our cab driver, like many in Taiwan, was addicted to what the locals call binlang, or beetle seed. This is basically Taiwanese skoal, and like the tobacco fields of the south, the beetle seed tree seems to be growing by the thousands on every hillside. The only difference in beetle seed and tobacco is that the beetle seed produces a thick red liquid that looks like someone is spitting up blood. Back to the roads...the windy mountain roads were destroyed by massive landslides, some moving boulders weighing a few tons each. This made for some sketchy make-shift detours. On one such detour a few small rocks fell on the roof of our car. I was waiting for a large boulder to knock our car over the edge, but luckily that never happened.
After a long journey, we finally arrived at A Li Mountain. The place was like a ghost town, no tourists in site and no shops open to the public. We checked into our hotel and then set out to explore the mountains. It was beautiful, full with peaceful Buddhist temples, enormous trees, peaceful ponds with mirror-like reflections and thousand year old trees in the shape of elephants, hearts and dragons. The most amazing view was the "sea of clouds." With the elevation being over 2000 km high, the clouds settled below us making it look like an open sea with neighboring mountain ranges jutting out like desolate islands. There was an overwhelming peace about the place. We were looking forward to rising early the next morning and hiking out to "sunrise point" but upon our return to the hotel we found that there was a message from the travel agency saying a typhoon is on the way and it would be best for us to leave the mountains or we could get trapped over night. We heeded to the request.
After a scary decent, we again boarded the high-speed train and returned to Taipei. We finally arrived back in the capitol city at 9:00 P.M. and found a place to stay for the night. It had been two days since we had had a good nights rest so we were excited to get into a bed. An early nap made me unable to sleep later in the night. I finally went to bed around 1:30 A.M. and while I was laying there almost asleep my bed started shaking. I thought it was a dream, but then I opened my eyes and the room seemed to be moving. I was still convinced that I was in a 1/2 sleep, 1/2 awake delirious state of mind so I stood up...still shaking. I stood there listening to the building's structure creeking as it swayed back and forth. After about 10 seconds it finally stopped. "What was it?" I thought. "An earthquake? No, don't try to sound so cool Tyler," I told myself, "must have just been the wind." Come to find out there had been a 6.3 earthquake in the south of Taiwan (near A Li Mountain) and Taipei experienced a 2.0 tremor around the same time. What a day!!!
More about the rest of our trip will be on here soon. Enjoy a few pics of our Taiwan pics below:
