Further Wanderings

As usual, our first stop on arriving in the northern port city of Keelung was the visitor information centre. Surprisingly, no one there really spoke English, but they made up for it by having a staff of about 8, all of whom fussed over us as we tried to find a cheap place to stay and how to go about buying our ferry tickets. The first was easy. The second, surprisingly, turned out to be perhaps even moreso. The visitor centre staff phoned a number, then gave the receiver to us. After a minute of trying to dictate our passport details to the gentleman on the other end he said “actually, I’m driving now. But I’m near where you are, so just wait five minutes and I’ll meet you there.” Lo and behold, the guy (his English name was Bevan, which particularly entertained me, since it’s such a typically Kiwi name) appeared soon after, took down our details, and told us to meet him at the ferry terminal in two days time where we could pay for and pick up our tickets. Sorted.

After a short walk through the city, we found the two hotels we were looking for and, after a quick comparison of the rooms, chose the cheaper (and nicer looking, if slightly smoky smelling) one.

Launching a sky lantern on (literally on) the Pingxi spur rail line
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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 ... [Continue reading this entry]

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]

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]