Further Wanderings

As mentioned in the last entry, Sarah and I were reunited outside Hualien train station.
Hualien is roughly 1/3 of the way down Taiwan’s east coast, and is best known as the gateway city to the Taroko Gorge, whose geological wonders we planned to spend a day or two exploring.

The evening of my arrival we headed straight to our hotel (not difficult as it was pretty much across the street from the station) and went out for a big post tramp dinner. We found it at one of the buffet style restaurants we’d grown so fond of. The food at this one looked good, and they had big bowls of the soy-chili mixture to add to your food. Shockingly I actually managed to overdo it on the chilis. They like them hot on the east coast apparently. After the application of sauce, my rice was so spicy that I had to ask Sarah to run out and grab a bubble tea to drink, and order another bowl of rice in order to dilute the heat, lest I leave a big pile of chilis at the bottom of the bowl (which would, of course, have been embarrassing and desperately wounded my pride.)

The restaurant we had dinner at in Hualien. Look closely. True, having a pig in the restaurant probably wouldn’t measure up to most western food safety regulations, but at least in a buffet restaurant you could be reasonably confident that they were making good use of food scraps and not simply recycling them
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Our next destination following our week of being lazy bums in Taipei was a bit of a lazy bum kind of place in itself. The city of Yilan, about 150km from Taipei on Taiwan’s northeast coast, is known for its beaches and its surfing.

The trip passed through the northern tip of Taiwan’s central mountains. By bus it was pretty much as-the-crow-flies, making most of the journey in tunnels. We opted for the train which, while it had plenty of tunnels as well, also gave some lovely views of small fishing ports, black sand beaches, and the occasional outrageously ostentatious Taiwanese beach house.

Yilan was our first (and as it turned out also last) couchsurfing stop in Taiwan, and we went straight from the station to meet our host Miguel at his language exchange partner’s uncle’s restaurant. This worked out wonderfully, as it was just about dinner time, and someone’s friend’s uncle’s noodle shop is exactly the kind of dining establishment that most appeals to us. We chomped some delicious spicy mutton noodles and bright green veggies, then went out for a bit of a walk around the Yilan night market as Miguel spoke Chinese (and Spanish) with his partner.

Cliffs in Shei Pa National Park from the trail up to Shyueshan
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You may be thinking that the title of this post is a bit of a joke. But no, it's not. That pretty much is what we did in Taipei for a week. Our friends Jess and Erik were taking ... [Continue reading this entry]

We'd decided to stay in the town of Shueli instead of at Sun Moon Lake itself because, as one of the foremost tourist sites in Taiwan, we expected its hotels to command fairly hefty prices, even on weekdays. After the half ... [Continue reading this entry]

From Changhua we were headed further down the Taiwan western rail line to the very edge of the tropics, Chiayi City (Taiwan is divided up into counties, most of which have a city by the same name at their centres. ... [Continue reading this entry]

Our first foray out of Taipei into the ROT (Rest of Taiwan) was down the west side of the island to the city of Changhua, situated roughly halfway down its length and 30km or so inland from the sea. The west ... [Continue reading this entry]

Our first day in Taipei started fairly late. Indeed, most of our days did. Partly because we're both generally night owls, and also because Jess and Erik were at work from about 15:00 to 23:00, and we kind ... [Continue reading this entry]

The boat used on the Mawei (China) to Matsu (Taiwan) trip was much smaller than the other international ferries we'd been on. It had more in common with the oversized speedboat that we took across the straits of Malacca ... [Continue reading this entry]