English Village was still on break last Friday, so Gered and I took advantage of the 3-day weekend and jaunted off to Hualien! We left Friday morning at 7-something, and after a mere 6 hours on the train, we were there.
Where exactly is Hualien? I'm glad you asked.
The skinny red line from Kaohsiung to Hualien is the railroad (approximately; I drew it in myself but I think it's pretty good).
On the way to Hualien, I'm checking out my travel guide to see exactly what there is to do in Hualien. Here is a summary:
-there are these special dumplings you should eat
-it's next to the ocean, so I guess you could go check that out
-there is this special dessert that you should eat, mochi
-there are a couple of temples and museums...of course Taiwan is covered with temples but if you're in town you could go check out these ones if you wanted
-I hope you didn't want much in the way of nightlife or anything
Basically, Hualien is not a super-hopping town. Also it rains a lot. So our Game Plan upon arrival was: 1) check into hostel, 2) eat some special dumplings for lunch, 3) go down to the beach, 4) poke around a little bit, maybe see a temple and find some mochi? Beats me.
As you can see, it was a highly specific game plan. The hostel was nice, they had cute little dogs and I think we were the only people staying there. The special dumplings were pretty decent, and came in an oniony broth that tasted pretty much like the flavor packet from a package of ramen. We got to the beach okay, except it turned out that the beach was under construction, so we didn't actually go down to the water. The edge of the beach was comprised of giant cement things that looked like jacks, presumably a sort of breakwater. So maybe the construction machines down on the beach were putting in some more jacks. I didn't look very closely, plus there was a fence. It was a different sort of beach.
Anyway, we walked down the coast and chilled a little bit, when it started to rain. It was a nice little refreshing drizzle for a while, but then it turned into pouring buckets. Annnnd the rest of the afternoon and evening was on-and-off crazy rain. Welcome to Hualien! Also it got dark really early. Gered was ready to go to sleep by the time we got back to the hostel at night...at 7 pm. However, the hostel did not in fact have towels available (the internet lied to us about this!), so in order to shower we had to venture back out into the dark and stormy night on a quest for towels. Which then turned into a quest for mochi, after we had found towels and were feeling a bit hungry. If you have not had mochi, they are a kind of dessert-thing that I believe is of Japanese origin, with a chewy outer layer made of glutinous rice and some kind of filling. It is a dessert well-suited to the Taiwanese, who are pretty much suckers for anything glutinous. There are mochi shops everywhere you look in Hualien, EXCEPT for of course anywhere in the vicinity of our hostel, so it was kind of a longish mission to find mochi, but it was totally worth it.
On Saturday, we woke up early and got a bus up to Taroko Gorge National Park. I'm going to go ahead and say that Taroko is probably the most beautiful place I've ever been. The mountains are breathtaking, giant and green and gorgeous, with rushing rivers wrapped around their feet and occasional waterfalls tumbling down their sides. True Fact: there are taller mountains in Taiwan than there are anywhere in the entire eastern half of the U.S. Perhaps this is part of why I was so impressed. True But Lame Fact: my camera failed to work at all on this trip so I have no pictures of any of this. I will steal Gered's pictures whenever I get the chance.
From the entrance to Taroko, we hopped on a big old tour bus and hulked our way along some skinny little roads, winding around and sometimes underneath the mountains, until we ended up at a small town called Tianxiang in the middle of the park. Tianxiang seemed to consist mainly of a bus stop, a visitor center, a few crummy little restaurants, and 3 hotels: a big resort, a medium sized but still expensive hotel, and a cheap little hostel. Guess where we stayed.
Aside from having extremely firm (shall we say) beds, the hostel was actually kind of amazing and very idyllic. Perched up on a small hill, it was surrounded by plants and flowers, and there was even a rooftop garden as well. A hilarious little dog guarded the door, and a mama cat lounged around the patio while her kittens wrestled with each other. There are towering mountains on every side, and on the other side of the street the land drops off sharply into a gorge. For less than US$20 per person, you can have a room with a balcony that overlooks all of this. Taiwan is so excellent.
Having found a home base in Tianxiang, we launched off to hike the Baiyang Waterfall trail. Although the trail itself was very flat and easy to hike, it involved passing through a number of tunnels, some of them quite long and quite dark. At the entrance to the first tunnel, a sign reminded us to bring our flashlights. We had no flashlights. Consequently, I found myself walking fairly long distances in the dark, carefully treading ground that I was unable to see. Usually there was some glimmer of light in the distance or around a corner or even from another hiker's flashlight, but at times I found myself in complete pitch blackness, clutching the handrail for direction. The thought even crossed my mind: what if there is a giant pit in the middle of the trail up ahead of me? I would fall right into it! This was closely followed by the thought: Gered is a couple steps ahead of me, so if there were a pit, he would fall into it first and yell, so I am probably safe. Dear paranoid part of my brain: way to be rational! Gered later referred to this part of the hike as a Tunnel of Doom, which I appreciated, and you should too if you are a Kreher. Unfortunately, I neglected to bring my Tunnel of Doom kit with me to Taroko (or Taiwan for that matter...I believe it is at home under my bed), so I was woefully underprepared for a real live Tunnel of Doom.
Anyway, all of the doom tunnels were totally worth it, because there were some spectacular views along the actual sunlit portion of the trail. The trail was not named Baiyang Waterfall for nothing - several times I rounded a corner or came out of a tunnel and was met by the view of a waterfall or two or three. One particularly picturesque set of waterfalls had what can only be described as a Crazy Death Bridge in front of it. It was the kind of skinny wooden thing suspended by ropes that you always see in movies. In the movie, there will be some kind of crucial chase going on, and when our hero tries to cross the bridge, the rotting wood collapses under him and the ropes snap and how will he ever survive!?! but of course he does. In real life, the Crazy Death Bridge was not rotting and the ropes were made of metal and it seemed generally sturdy, but that does not negate the fact that it swayed and bounced when I walked on it, and there was a warning sign saying that the bridge had a 10-person limit. Also it was over a GIANT FRICKIN GORGE. Nevertheless, I managed to survive and make it back through the doom tunnels safely. Hooray!
I forget if this happened before or after we went on a hike, but we also had a kind of amazing experience at the visitor center in Tianxiang. First, I must explain that when we left on this trip, Gered still didn't know whether or not his Frisbee team was participating in a tournament in Taizhong on Sunday, so we weren't sure if we'd have to leave Saturday or Sunday. Hence, when we found out Friday night that they weren't going, we didn't have much of a specific game plan for the rest of the weekend. Since we were already in Tianxiang, we thought that we might possibly kind of just make a loop and go out through the west side of the park and down the west coast to Kaohsiung. Here is my amazing map again, in case you forgot what it looked like:
This would mean taking the yellow route home (the red is how we got there). The east-west portion of this route goes along the Central Cross-Island highway, straight through more of those spectacular mountains that run down the middle of Taiwan. It seemed like it would be a pretty cool scenic route to get home. We also thought we might just go out to Hehuanshan (one of the big peaks on the far western edge of the park) and then come back the way we came, if going all the way through didn't work. With these goals in mind, I peppered the nice lady at the visitor center with questions about how we could pull it off. She told us that there was a bus that went as far as Dayuling (about 2/3 of the way into the park), but after that there were no buses, and the only way to get any further was dabianche. This was a word that I had never heard before, but since che means "vehicle," I knew it had to be some form of transportation. I asked again a couple times about getting to Hehuanshan, but the answer was always the same: you can take the bus to Dayuling, but after that the only possible way is dabianche. We were at an impasse until another man entered the visitor center to ask the woman a question. He overheard our conversation a bit, and tried to help me out with a little English. Finally I asked him directly, "what does dabianche mean?" He informed me very matter-of-factly, "Dabianche means hitchhike!"
My eyebrows pretty much hit the ceiling on this one. This is the recommendation from an official park visitor center! Isn't it dangerous? I asked. Oh, just try to find a family with kids, she told me. It's pretty safe. Ooooookay.
Well, we pondered hitchhiking our way back into the realm of Available Public Transportation, but in the end we just didn't have enough buffer time to risk it. If you glance up at the map again, the black section of the route is the part where there is no way to travel besides hitchhiking (well, and actually having your own car), and over the rest of the yellow part between there and Taizhong (T'aichung on this map) we'd have to rely on the occasional public buses, which probably wouldn't be running anymore by the time we got there at night. In the end, we resigned ourselves to going back the way we came.
That evening, I had a kind of exciting experience, for Taiwan: I was cold, and not just from being in an overly-air-conditioned space! No, it was genuinely cool outside in Tianxiang. I wore jeans and a sweatshirt! It was crazy. We went for dinner at a little cafe in the other hotel, where it turned out that the fare consisted mainly of microwave personal pizzas. Mmm, deliciously mediocre! And of course it had peas and corn and random stuff on it, because we are in Asia here, let's not forget. Eating microwave pizza in a secluded village in the mountains of Taiwan: kind of surreal. After a pot of raspberry tea (because it was cold enough out to really want hot tea!! this was amazing), we retired to the hostel for a wild and crazy night of reading a little bit and falling asleep promptly at 9:30. Woooo!
Our bus back to Hualien left at 9 am, so we got up at 7ish and did some final poking around Tianxiang. There was some kind of pagoda up on the side of one the mountain at the edge of town, so we went up to investigate it. Apparently it was a temple to the God of Stairs, because getting up to the pagoda involved climbing approximately 547382534982795392 steps of stairs. I'm pretty sure that I filled my entire stair quota for all of October in that one morning. The pagoda was nice...very pagoda-like? I don't really know what to say about it. The temple also had a gift shop and a little stand where I got some sort of fried pancake and a couple slices of tofu for breakfast. We took the breakfast to go, because it was time to catch the bus back to Hualien!
In Hualien we grabbed a little lunch, bought some more mochi, and tried to find a bus that would take us down the east coast. The train line is further inland, but you can take a bus right down the coastal highway, which is really pretty. My travel guide informed us that there was some kind of restaurant by the normal bus stand where you could get bus tickets to go down the coast. The normal bus station didn't have any buses that would take us all the way to Taidong, where we wanted to go, and we asked at a restaurant around the corner that looked promising, but they only rented vehicles. It was really hot and sunny at this time, and I was feeling hot and a little bit grumpy. I wanted to just take the normal bus and transfer, but Gered was convinced that we could find the bus line mentioned by my travel guide, so we poked around the area a bit more, ending up at the visitor center. The helpful folks at the visitor center gave us free postcards of Hualien, and pointed us to a nearby row of mochi shops. It turns out that one of the shops, in addition to selling traditional local snacks, sells bus tickets down the east coast. Go figure.
So we grooved on down the east coast on a bus, taking in the sights. One of the characteristic features of Taiwan is unusual juxtapositions: ornate temples in the midst of weather-beaten concrete buildings, bus tickets in a mochi shop, and huge mountains right smack dab next to the sea. It's really amazing that Taiwan has such high peaks, considering that they have to get all the way up there from sea level over a pretty short distance. Driving down Taiwan's east coast, you can have the ocean on your left, and on your right, a big ol' mountain rising right out of the sea. It's definitely a must-see part of Taiwan.
The bus ride was pretty, albeit rather long. This was alleviated a bit by the presence of a really adorable small girl in the seat in front of me. First, I noticed the shiny black top of a small head peeking over the seat. A pair of eyes appeared, and I smiled at her. She immediately ducked back out of sight. This little peekaboo ritual was repeated a number of times, but each time she came up for a little bit longer, and each time she ducked back down, Gered and I would grin like fools at the cuteness. Once I even got a little answer to a question in Chinese! Then her mother moved the two of them to another seat on the bus, and I was a little bit sad.
It was already dark when we got into Taidong, and we still needed to catch a train back to Kaohsiung. At the train station, the ticket agent informed us that the next train was at 7:13, but there were no seats left. The next train after that didn't get into Kaohsiung until very late, so we opted to suck it up and just take the first train. Riding the train was another one of those Great Adventures in Staring for a little bit...when we were waiting to sit down, a little girl pointed at me and asked her mother loudly, "What kind of person is THAT??" Then we sat in some unoccupied seats for the first leg of the journey, across from a man who blatantly stared at me the whole time. Staring Man got off at the next station, but our seats' owner got on, and we were forced out. We ended up just sitting on the floor in the back of the car, tiredly typing up our weekly reports for Fulbright (due every Sunday night!) on Gered's little computer.
When we got into Kaohsiung, it was quite late, but the subway was still running, so we subwayed it to the stop near our apartments and walked the final stretch. It was around 11 pm when I finally arrived home...one looooong day of transportation, considering that we left Tianxiang at 9 am, but definitely worth the trip. Maybe sometime when there's a little more time I can do it again and dabianche my way home.
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