Wednesday we caught a train to Chiayi, which is a bit further south than Hualien, but on the western side of the island instead. I caught a brief look at the Taiwan Straits and the East China Sea, but couldn’t see the mainland. It’s apparently too far away. Chiayi is a large tropical town with lots of insects, and a McDonalds, where I discovered that the McFish Sandwich tastes more “fishy” in Taiwan, and that the Chicken McNuggets are just as awful as they are in the states.
From Chiayi we took the “world-famous” Forest Railway, an old, small gauge train built by the Japanese in 1912 that winds it’s way up the steep and beautiful mountains from 31 meters at Chiayi to over 2000 meters at the town of Alishan.
I was repeatedly told that the Forest Railway is world-famous, but have yet to meet a non-Taiwanese person who has heard of it. It’s quite impressive, nonetheless.
The entire journey begins in a tropical rainforest, and takes you through semi-tropical forests and then finally into a temperate forest where ancient pines grow.
Shrouded in clouds, the mountains around Alishan (including Alishan, which is also a mountain) are eerie. The small clouds crawl across the surface of the mountains like living creatures. At anytime, these roving amoebae-like monsters might swallow the ground you stand upon.
We arrived at sundown and were warned to stay in our hotel room for the night as there are no streetlights in Alishan and people get lost if they go out.
Go out? What? Were they crazy? I had a hotel room, with a bed! A full night’s sleep was all I had in mind!
The bed was a board.
Luckily, in the closet they had these “Chinese Blankets” as Chu-Wan called them. Personally, I think they were futons. Picture sleeping with a futon over you. They weighed about 25 pounds, were mostly stiff (they had to be rolled up in the closet) and about 2 inches thick. I slept on one and under another!
During the night (while I slept) there was a small earthquake. I complained afterwards to Chu-wan that she should have woke me up, but by then it was too late.