Home is where you stay

The weekend of July 23-24 was certainly a memorable one. There was adventure and lots of fun. It was a trip to haulien, this is my 3rd visit to this place and everytime it is a new experience.

The first one was with vishy, sahil and amitabh. During this trip we were the conservative tourists opting for a tour bus to take us around the Haulien scenic area.

The second one with hemanth and anul was by a car. The only good thing about this trip was that we tried out some surfing at a beach south of haulien. But the drive is too long and you will end up with too little for the outdoors.

The third trip is certainly I feel the best way to travel and visit. We travelled to Haulien by train early in the morning. There are trains for every half hour from the taipei main station. Take the fast one. We were lucky we got a seat, to be sure of a seat reserve it before hand. There is a travel information desk just outside the Haulien train station (towards right) and the people there are very helpful and will help you on anything related to your trip be it chalking out a plan or assisting in any reservations.

Renting out a car was too easy nothing asked, so as long as you get the car back in one shape everything should be fine. Our journey started after a good lunch and we searched around for the right turn to make it to the highway which will lead us to Taroke gorge. There is plenty of sign boards, but sometimes it becomes too confusing might be because the spellings on these boards are not consistent.

We drove along to the taroko national part which is along the central cross island highway. The road has some breath taking sigths, we stopped very frequently to take in the views and freshness in the air. We started of from the “eternal spring shrine”, walked along the “Tunnel of Nine Turns” and finished the journey at Tiansiang which has a pagoda and a very beautiful buddha temple. The roads along this highway has lots of twists, turns and long tunnels. This road is really an amazing piece of construction as it was built by bare hands without any of the modern equipements. You can have a look at some of the scenic spots from this website http://www.taroko.gov.tw/english/. The taroko part has a lot of trails, time constraints did not allow us to explore them but yeah I will come back again.

Day 2 of our trip was what everybody was eagerly waiting for rafting on the Siouguluan river. The trip starts of from Rueisuei. When we went there we were lost in the flood of people who had come to take this tour, the crowd was in excess of 500. we met a englishing speaking person who guided us through the steps to get urself with a life jacket and helmet. But then i had to appreciate the efficiency with which the organizers worked. People were divided into teams and each team kept on departing on the rafts one by one. In fact when we were on the raft we realized the fun of the crowd, there are more people to splash water, but ha ha yeah you do get your share of water. On the raft we were 10 people the five intu guys on one side and the 5 taiwanese guys on the other side (It was their last day of college and they choose to have fun this way). We started around 10 am, the river was a mix of smooth rides and stretches of rough water(this part was real fun). The smooth sections were all spent in having water fights or racing the with the other rafts. In fact some times it used be hilarious a boat would come very close to you and people would take water using tumblers (actually given to remove water from the raft) and pour it over the head of the person sitting on the other boat. It was fun all the way. We stopped at around one pm and lunch boxes were provided by the organizers. I got a veggie lunch box, and umm it was delicious. The second half of the trip was more adventurous, water a bit more rough and we had a nice time trying to sit ourselves tight during the rough stretches. At one time our boat almost got overturned. This stretch was quite exhauting and at around 3:30 pm we reached the final destination. It was almost near an estuary and offerred a beautiful sight, guess the evenings should be quite pleasant here. We had a small photo shoot with the indo-taiwan boat team, Dried myself up had a good refreshing honey lemon tea (Fong mein liu cha). Being exhausted everybody were mostly keeping to themselves enjoying a good nap on the way back to the Haulien train station.

We had around 2 hours time before we could catch the bus back to taipei with carol. So we went to a beach near haulien by taxi (costed around 150 NTD one way). This beach is somewhere behind the haulien airport. The beach is a rocky one with almost no sand. We guys just lazed out having a cup of coffee while enjoying the breeze. Had trouble catching a taxi back to the station, couple of shop vendors helped us out with this.