Hualien & The Taroko Gorge
Biking in Hualien
After getting plenty of sleep to counter my jet-lag, I awoke for my second day in Taiwan and was introduced to the newest member of our entourage, a friend of Andy’s cousin. Her name was Hsuia-Sheng, and was a very outspoken woman. She was apparently a 75th generation descendant of Confuscius, bearing his last name. She had also been disinherited by her parents for following her beliefs for a sovereign Taiwan. After a very pleasant breakfast, we went into town and rented some bikes to bike to a well know area 10 miles away, called Liyu Lake. On our ride we got some great Taiwanese baked roll caled Bolo, that melted in my mouth and had a very pleasing buttery and sugary taste. The scenery that we biked over was pleasingly flat and simultaneously beautiful.
After a while, Hsuia-Sheng started falling behind, so Andy’s aunt fell back to keep pace with her while we continued on to the lake. When we reached it I was surprised that it was seen as a cultural landmark. By midwestern standards, it would be considered a rather small lake, nonetheless it was beautiful.
Once Hsuia-Sheng and Andy’s aunt joined us we walked around for awhile and then started to head back. Hsuia-Sheng said that she couldn’t make it back, so much to my surprise she and Andy’s aunt jumped in a passing truck that had pulled over for them and told us to meet them at the bike shop. Apparently, the guy that picked them up was very friendly and actually gave them food along with the lift. I was pretty surprised by this, but it seemed to be normal for Andy’s aunt.
Later that night I got my first taste of Taiwanese night markets, and I definitely was not dissapointed, we had a lot of great Taiwanese specialties and at the end of the night we had this interesting egg, and fish food that had some sort of tough jelly sort of thing that was about the consistency of snot, but it tasted pretty good.
Touring Taroko (May 13 - 14)
The next morning we were off early, to get on a tour of the surrounding area and the entrance to the Taroko Gorge area, the hostel affixed us with a couple of breakfast hotdogs that were topped with various condiments like cucumbers and tomatoes. They were pretty delicious, even though I had never thought of having hot dogs before, atleast not until my friend Sam Parrote mentioned it in passing a couple weeks ago. The tour bus proceeded to pick a couple more people up and we were on our way. It drove along the coast and offered some really splendid views.
We eventually made our way inland along a road that had been built with much difficulty by the locals, during what I believe was the Japanese occupation (please take all of my historical musings with a grain of salt, I’m purely operating off of what I heard). There were some pretty great sights.
After entering the more scenic area we all donned some hard hats ‘to prevent injury from falling rocks’ and walked around some of the well trod trails. There were a lot of great sights and we had a pretty great time, and even got some lunch at the place that Andy and I would be staying in that night.
Eventually Andy’s aunt and Hsuia-Sheng headed back with the rest of the tour group and Andy and I stayed in the hostel that we had lunch in earlier. There was an interesting monastery nearby which we visited and trudged up some of the high pagodas to get some pretty great views of the surrounding area. After such a long day, we retired back to our hostel and I instantly fell asleep, only Andy waking me up to eat dinner rose me out of my stupor. Upon finishing dinner, I instantly fell back asleep; I may have still been readjusting to the timezone.
Hiking Taroko
The next day we woke up to hike the infamous Taroko Gorge. Andy did a great job of figuring out all of the passes that we needed so when we got down to the trail-head we were granted access to the path and steadily made our way up the Old Jhuilu Trail. It was a pretty intense hike, with an upwards hike most of the way. While we were walking we saw a fair number of workers hauling wooden slabs up the path to fix parts of the steps that were being renovated. There was also some animal that was making incredibly loud sounds that sounded almost identical to a power drill; I thought it was a bird while Andy was positive it was a large insect. About half-way up the peak, we came across a little ruin of an old town that looked pretty interesting.
Once we reached the top, there was a large stone wall on your right, followed by a very thin walking path, and then a fatal drop on the left. Luckily there was a rope attached to the cliff, that I cautiously affixed both hands to with an iron grip, while Andy walked confidently without so much as bothering to hold it.
We got past the terrifying part of the hike and made it to a little rest area. We would have liked to continue hiking, unfortunately the path had been washed out by a recent rock slide so we just had lunch and decided to turn around. While we were eating lunch, we talked with some of the other hikers and apparently one of the guides died yesterday in the relatively safe area where we had been yesterday. It was a freak accident and they thought that he had drowned in the water after hitting his head or something. Andy and I were quite surprised. After finishing our lunch we headed back down the mountain, drenched with sweat and relishing the great hike.
We got back to Hualien, and got on a train back to Taipei. We were both pretty exhausted when his aunt met us outside of the train station and walked with us along the night markets of Taipei buying great food like Fried tofu, and a dough wrapped ice-cream that makes my mouth water just thinking about it. We also got some stinky tofu, that honestly smells like some sort of fecal extrement, but tastes alright, as long as you can ignore the smell. It’s one of the most popular foods in Taiwan, and many locals can’t get enough of it. We were also lucky enough to run into a local celebration, we had no idea what they were celebrating but it was a really nice little show. There was a sort of parade followed by acrobatic shows and a lion-dance. Afterwards we both succumbed to our profound exhaustion and made our way to his Grandpa’s home and almost instantly fell asleep, that is after we were practically force fed some delicious fruit!
