Trip to Various Parts of the Island

I have decided to finally begin the intimidating task of giving a summary of my 9 day trip to various parts of Taiwan with my host parents.  There is quite a lot to tell, and some nice pictures, so this is going to be a pretty long post I think.

We first visited the city of Taichung, where my much of my host father's family lives.  After visiting his mother and sister, my host mother and I went to Taichung's museum of Natural History.  We were going specifically to see an exhibit about the making of the movie "Life of Pi", which is by the great Taiwanese directer Ang Lee, and was partly shot in Taiwan.  That particular exhibit turned out to be a bit disappointing, but other parts of the museum were absolutely fantastic.  The most informative part was the museums permanent exhibit on the Taiwanese aboriginal people, and it was also one of the only parts of the museum with an english translation, so I learned quite a bit.  The other very cool part was an exhibit on ancient Chinese technology.  Its highlight was a so-called equatorial torquetum.  I have no idea what that is but it looked amazing, here is a picture.

After one night in Taichung, we began to drive east into the middle of the island, towards Taiwans mountain ranges.  We drove for quite a while, into the night, so by the time we arrived at our hotel it was too dark to see any scenery at all.  We ate a very good meal at a nearby restaurant , then returned to our hotel for the night...  I had no idea where we had been staying the night, so when I awoke and walked out of the room to head to breakfast, I was very surprised at the view I got...

We had arrived in Cingjing farm area, in a place known as Taiwan's "Little Switzerland".  I hadn't noticed my surroundings the night before, but when I awoke and walked out of the room onto a nearby deck outside, I was truly shocked by the view.  Not only was it incredibly beautiful, but also completely unexpected.  That day, we explored more mountains inside one of Taiwan's eight national parks, Shei-Pa.  It had many beautiful peaks, most of them quite high, as you can see from the following photos.



After driving out of Shei-Pa National Park, we arrived for the night in the small town of Lishan, famous for its fruit, and especially its large pears.  We tried some of the fruit that night, quite delicious.  The next morning we awoke and visited a famous hotel in Lishan.  It is one of three hotels in Kaohsiung which has the architecture of a traditional Chinese Palace.  The other two are in Kaohsiung and Taipei.

I think it was this day that we also visitied the Sacred Pilu Tree, although it is hard to keep track of when we saw what.  My host father is an extraordinarily thorough tourist, so we usually got out of the car to see anything that looked to be of historical/cultural/geographical/culinary/natural interest.  It was a bit tiring, but we didn't miss much!  Anyway, the Sacred Pilu Tree was essentially just a tall tree, but it is also estimated to be 3000 years old...  one way to put that into perspective, when Jesus was alive, it was already 1000 years old.  Pretty mind-blowing.

Anyway, we took leave of the Sacred Tree and headed for Taroko National Park, Taiwan's top tourist destination outside of Taipei.  It gets its fame for good reason.  It's an extremely beautiful park, with an incredible gorge as its main attraction.  The gorge is truly a wonderful sight, with sheer cliffs on both sides, composed predominantly of marble.  The best stretch of the gorge is the Tunnel of Nine Turns, where it is very deep, and the oversized cliffs block out the majority of the sky.  However, this portion of the gorge was also packed with tourists, mostly from China.  Although it is a top tourist destination, I saw very few western tourists.  The majority were Chinese.  I also met some Singaporeans, Indonesians, and Malaysians on the trip, all were very interesting to talk to (most of them spoke english quite well).

After staying a couple of nights in Taroko, we moved on to the east coast.  It was much more striking than the west coast I am used to (which is very flat), because the east coast is basically just sheer cliff.  It made for some amazing scenery.  The water was also very interesting to look at, due to its multi-colored nature.  This part of the coast is often used for car commercials, and for good reason I think.

We continued to drive down the coast, and the landscape began to flatten out as we moved south.  After a few hours, we unexpectedly saw a sign for the Tropic of Cancer Landmark.  After some miles, we arrived at the landmarker.  Being a nerd, this excited me greatly, so many pictures were taken.

Soon after, we were in Kenting, the southernmost part of the island, and then back on the west coast, driving North, and then back in Kaohsiung.  It was an amazing trip and I'm so grateful to my family, Rotary, and of course my incredible host parents for taking me with them.  I have seen so much of this amazing island now, and I look forward to seeing more in the coming months.

Until next time, 再見