Ni Hao!

We haven’t had much luck finding reliable internet lately, so we’ve been quite behind in posting. Or rather, we have been having too much fun traveling that we are ignoring our blog.

Most buildings here are built with steel, concrete & plaster, so hotel wireless is often flakey. It takes us hours just to search for hostels & get directions to the next town so there’s usually no time left for blogging.

We have been on the road in Taiwan, on our around-island trip, for a week now. Although we’ve had the car A/C on all the time, we’ve only gone through 2 tanks of gas, and we have yet to roll over 1,000 km; Taiwan is a small island, and even though the distances between towns are not great, roads are often twisty, treacherous and slow. Also, Taiwan being an archipelago (volcanically-created island), has so many different climate zones and unique geographic areas, the scenery is so drastically different every 100 km, it has been an exciting and refreshing drive.

Here’s what we’ve been upto since our last blog post:

Thursday - Taroko - 太魯閣國家公園

The Taroko gorge is one of the most amazing sights either of us have ever seen in our entire lives. Cameras simply can’t capture the scale of the sheer marble and limestone cliffs that climb vertically from the gorge to the sky. 250 Million years of seismic activity combined with vicious soil erosion have formed a very narrow, vertical, twisting canyon through the mountains in Taroko. The highway through the heart of the gorge is carved into the marble like a 3-walled tunnel. With road below, jagged rocky faces to one side and directly overhead, it’s shaped like a giant “C” carved into the side of the canyon, with one side left open, facing the gorge. It’s epic.

(With sore necks) we arrived at the 5-star Hotel Grand Formosa (天祥晶華) in the heart of the Taroko National Park at 天祥 (pronounce - Tian Xiang). We had planned to use the spa, pool(s), sauna, steam room, bowling lanes, pool tables, bumper-cars and arcade but instead got distracted by a giant 2 liter bottle of sake. We ended up staying in our hotel room all night, heating up round after round of sake in a small plastic thermos bottle inside our electric kettle, ordering room service and catching up on our downloaded TV. It was SO fun.

Friday - Hot springs at Chihpen

Hung over, we crossed the tropic of cancer late afternoon on Friday- marked by a funky roadside monument. It was raining so we didn’t get out, but instead drove straight to our second 5 star resort, The Hotel Royal Chihpen- 知本老爺 - this time to go bathe in one of Taiwan’s most popular hotsprings. Yes, the water was soothing, but the highlight by far was the “fish spa“, where very small fish (some breed of Carp) nibble the dead skin and cuticles right off your hands and feet. Tickle 3000. We were pampered beyond our expectations. It was refreshing and relaxing.

Chat soon- but for now: here’s a video of us in Taroko, a few kilometers upstream from the deep cavernous gorge, on a rickety old suspension bridge above the river. Yikes!

Once again, pictures to come.