Hualien > Taitung
Friday, October 26th, 2007There were bikes for rent at the Hero Hotel (pink ones!), so we decided to go for a bike ride before heading out to Taitung – the gateway to the Green Island. We biked along this really super-well-developed bike trail that ended at this really nice beach. Lovely.
The weird thing about being on Taiwan is it’s not that big of an island so you see these Blue Angel type military planes flying over all the time. When you’re in the smaller towns, that is. You don’t see them when you’re in Taipei and the such. Taiwan is not that fond of mainland China right now. There are these signs everywhere since Taiwan wants admission into the UN separate from China. Good luck with that.
Anyway, after our bike ride we bopped onto a train to Taitung. We found our hotel, Fuyuan, and then headed off to find a travel agent that spoke English. The one in the Lonely Planet had moved, but luckily the neighbor pointed us in the right direction. This super nice travel agent booked our ferry tickets for the next day and called our hotel for us to reserve a room since the owners of the hotel we wanted to stay at didn’t speak English. We then headed off to figure out the bus situation and went to the visitor’s center in the old train station where they pointed us in the right direction and wrote things in Chinese for us so we could get tickets for the next day.
After, we headed to this Seaside park where we thought we could see the blink of the lighthouse of green island (where we headed the next day) we headed to this dumpling place suggested in our book. Oh my gosh, I thought the dumplings were okay (not like blown away by them, but just okay), but we also ordered spicy noodles that were so friggin’ spicy – oh my gosh – I mean, like 6 star hot – then we headed to this candy shop we had seen earlier. It was like Halloween (no Halloween this year 🙁 ). You just pile all these funky little wrapped candies in a bag and for this huge bag you pay like a dollar USD. Let’s just say that some of these candies were okay, and others were absolutely revolting. Sweetness levels are different here. And flavorings are WAYYYYY different. But, really, here again, what more can you ask for?
JohnCin