Sanxiantai, Taiwan

From Hualien we took a train about two hours further south to the city of Taitung on Taiwan’s East Coast Scenic Route. For our last couple of days in Taiwan we hoped to sightsee around the area and take an ocean ferry to Green Island offshore from Fugang village.  Green Island looks interesting; it has fringing coral and thermal pools at the water’s edge, and scooters available for hire to wander around the isle’s winding roads.  Just the spot to spend a night it seemed.

But we had misjudged how popular this coast is with weekend travellers from Taipei, and it was unsettling to discover in Taitung that all return trains to Taipei were booked out for the next several days.  So the limited time we had left was spent not sightseeing but standing in queues at the railway station trying to find a way back to Taipei.  Eventually we secured tickets for a train that ran across to Taiwan’s west coast from where we could whizz north on a bullet train back to Taipei.

Our travel problems solved (though not in a way to our liking), we had one afternoon left for sightseeing.  We took the hop on / hop off tourist shuttle bus north from Taitung.  The highlight was Sanxiantai, a tiny volcanic island near the town of Chenggong, accessible by a long dragon-shaped arch bridge.  It was fun to walk across, and admire the great coastal views backed by a brooding sky.  On the return journey to Taitung we stopped off at Fugang fishing village for a seafood meal of prawns and steamed snapper with ginger, then strolled down to the now dark waterfront to see the docked fishing boats and Green Island passenger ferries.  The air was warm and humid, and here and there small groups of people in twos or threes were sitting out the front of their shops or houses eating and chatting.  From there it was only a 15 minute taxi ride back to our motel in Taitung.

The following morning we boarded the west-bound train for the three hour cross-Island journey to Zuoying where we transferred to a bullet train that had us back in Taipei on Taiwan’s north coast within 90 minutes! This gave us a night to pack our bags and ready ourselves to return home to Adelaide on the morrow.  Vale Taiwan!

Taroko Gorge, Taiwan

Taiwan’s Central Cross-Island Highway is a spectacular engineering feat completed after World War II, though at a cost of 225 lives, many of them returned soldiers.  The road cuts through the steep north-south mountain range that bisects the island, and shortly before it reaches the eastern coast and Pacific Ocean, winds its way impossibly through the magnificent Taroko Gorge. Formed by the clash and enormous pressures of two of the earth’s tectonic plates, the Gorge’s colourfully striated marble walls rise to hundreds of metres in places.

In nearby Hualien where we had arrived by train from Taipei, we hired a taxi for the day to take us through the Gorge.  Along the way there are several picturesque walking trails and we hiked a few of these – the first took us around and through the photogenic Eternal Spring Shrine, a memorial to the 225 men who lost their lives during the highway’s construction.  Big landslides sometimes occur in the area; the shrine has been totally destroyed twice, so the current building is the third incarnation.  Further up the road visitors are advised to wear hard hats to provide some protection against possible falling rocks along the gorge faces.  And not to linger in those places with particularly bad track records.   

For us, Taroko lived up to its tourist hype; it truly is spectacular and well worth visiting.  The soaring gorge faces and Buddhist buildings reminded us of two of our favourite destinations in mainland China – Emei Shan in Sichuan province, and Tiger Leaping Gorge in Yunnan.  

A week in Taipei, Taiwan

Taipei is just a short 100 minute flight across the Taiwan Strait from Shanghai.  And a good place to rest up for a bit after my China classes were finished.  There’s plenty in Taipei to keep first-time visitors occupied for a few days and we crisscrossed the city in taxis to see a few of the sights.  The highlight, for us at least, was the Chiang kai-shek memorial hall featuring an enormous bronze statue of the Generalissimo and an hourly changing of its guard.  The building is beautiful, and the story documented inside fascinating (though no doubt a little more reverential towards Kai-shek than he truly deserved).  But there’s no doubting the significant part he played in modern Chinese history and his prominent time on the world stage following his defeat by the Chinese communists, and retreat to Taiwan, in 1949.  Kai-shek didn’t flee from the mainland empty-handed; he brought with him the treasures of the Forbidden City, and many of these are now displayed in the Palace Museum in northern Taipei. 

From what we’d read, we expected Taipei to have a food scene on the scale of Singapore or Malaysia but we found it to be a mere shadow of those two gastronomic paradises.  One notable exception was the dumpling restaurant chain Din Tai Fung, outside which people patiently queued for an hour or so to get a table. We had lunch on Sunday at their restaurant in the basement of Taipei 101, the world’s second-tallest building, and our own wait for a table was worth every minute.

Monday night we saw a Peking Opera performance at nearby Taipei Eye.  There were two short plays; the second, “Bottomless Pit” was the highlight.  The program explained that it involved Buddhist monk Tang San-zang and his three disciples heading west to receive scriptures from India.  Unfortunately, en route they happened upon the Bottomless Pit where San-zang was pulled in by the Albino Rat (aka Lady Earth Flow) who wished to feast on the flesh of the monk, thereby attaining eternal life.  In what I thought was the funniest line in the whole show (though strangely I was the only one laughing), when Tang San-zang was seized, Lady Earth Flow ordered one of her underlings to “Take him to the Pit and gut him!”  But all turned out well in the end.  Protector Wu-kong arrived on the scene, and encountered the Rat first whereupon they did battle.  The program went on to explain, “The Rat’s Taoist Magic is strong, putting Wu-kong in a pinch and forcing him to call on the Cat Spirit for help before they can bring the Albino Rat under control.”  It was a funny, slightly weird, highly entertaining show. Don’t miss it if you’re in Taipei.     

Yesterday we took a smooth high-speed train south of Taipei to Taichung in central Taiwan, and from there a bus into the mountain range that runs down the centre of the island.  Our destination was Sun Moon Lake, a pleasant enough body of water surrounded by tall peaks, and across which tourist boats conveyed crowds to see the various sights along the shore.