Hualien…enter the Frenchman…
Friday, October 26th, 2007So at the train station when we were waiting for the train we saw this other westerner (it’s usually pretty easy to pick people out that are westerners – big backpack and caucasian)…like the foreshadowing?
Anyway, the train was super nice – after like 3 hours we get to Haulien, the gateway to Taroko National Park. It’s one of the most visited places in Taiwan. Anyway, after John and I went the wrong way out of the train station (typical), checked out one hostel, went by another hotel that ended up being closed, we ran into the other westerner a Frenchman, Damien, at an intersection close to where we would ultimately all stay in the same room in the Hero House. It was like this super-fancy-looking place from the outside but they you could rent by the bed (4 beds/room) – so that’s what we did!
We ended up hanging out with Damien for several days – he is very cool and we saw a snapshot of France and he got a snapshot of America. He was just as clueless about the language as we are – he was also on an extended trip – he’d started in Canada > Japan > Taiwan and was headed to Malaysia afterwards – oh and he gave John a semi-crash-course in French wine…Steve, you’ve created a monster! You just had to feed John good wine – now he’s wanting to learn all about it…
Taroko National Park – completely awesome. This is a really beautiful park. Unfortunately they were working on a lot of the trails because of landslides. We wanted to hike the Shakadang Trail but it was closed. So we hitched it Tiansiang and did a hike there. We went part way up this one trail that was supposed to end at a Pavillion but we could only got partway up. But it was good enough and the views were really nice. There was also the Siangde Temple and a pagoda and lots of other pretty things there. All in all, the day we spent there was really nice (although the winding roads I could have done without). We ended the day at the night market in Haulien where John and Damien tried some internals of a chicken that I just didn’t need to know about and rode the funniest 3-wheeled bike things ever. They played the tune “Davie, Davie Crockett” – I can’t even describe how you got these things to move but they had to gyrate their bodies to get them to move. I’ve never laughed so hard.
Damien told us of his intentions to go to a place called Green Island the next day. After reading our guide book, we decided to go with him (since we had no clue where we were going next and it seemed like a good idea).
JohnCin