As mentioned previously, I slept badly during the night. The room was very nice, but without heating or cooling, apart from nature. The temperature would not have been too bad, a little cold, but the only bed covers were something between a duvet and an antarctic survival blanket.
Underneath it you sweated like a pig, outside the sweat turned to frost.
Combine that with the byproducts of super-conductor research that have slipped their way into Taiwanese toilet technology: a toilet seat that can divest itself of all heat, achieving almost complete lack of molecular motion, and you have a mid-night bathroom experienced guaranteed to make you shout like Goofy.
In the morning we went to the actual farm. We’d been promising Michelle that she’d see the sheep, and she was anticipating the visit. No surprises for Taiwan, but the sheep farm was a large grassy area up and down the side of a mountain.
Although Michelle petted a few sheep, the sheep weren’t too interested in her unless she had food, in which case they were too interested in her and began crowding in large numbers.
At the very top of the sheep farm is a walkway which they call, variably, the “The Great Wall” or “The Great Walkway”, the latter being the most accurate term. The walkway is at the top of the mountain, which is sharp ridge. On it you can walk 100 yards or so absolutely on the ridge between two massive valleys, looking down the steep hill on either side. It’s unique in my experience. Again, it was a shame that the air was so hazy.
While Michelle was not as fascinated by the sheep as she’d given advanced indication of, she had a lot of fun with her grandfather walking up and down the grassy hills, which is more important.
Next we went to a place called “Little Switzerland”, another grassy area that has been transformed in a faux-European fantasy garden. I suppose Europe might look like this, but it reminds me more of the entrance to Disneyland. It has intricately-manicured flower gardens, lakes, fountains and giant fake bugs.
Again, Michelle and her grandfather we all over the place.
At one point, though, she got away from him. I was following along behind (having stopped to pick up James’ dropped hat) going up a hill and saw Mr. Huang at the top of the hill. I looked over and saw Michelle already 40 yards ahead of him running full speed the other way. I couldn’t see what she was running towards, but I knew Mr. Huang couldn’t catch her.
I took off after her and caught her just as she was arriving at the arcade she’d spied from the top of the hill. While I didn’t mind that she went to the arcade (we weren’t giving her any money to play the games) I did mind that she’d took off. She knows she’s not supposed to do that.
I had a talk to her about it, but since it was a relatively safe area, I wasn’t too harsh and let her continue to play.
After a while, everyone else arrived and we let her play a bit more. Once she’d played with every game, Irene told her it was time to move on and that she could play with one more game.
At this point she was apparently struck selectively deaf, and she absolutely refused to acknowledge that we were even talking to her. Irene tried to talk to her and let her play a little while longer, but she tried to run away and then, when caught, started screaming and crying.
At that point, my tolerance threshold got exceeded and I picked her up and walked her the 250 yards out of the park. All the while she was kicking and screaming that she wanted to be put down and go to her grandfather. Of course, everyone in the place was staring at us.
When we go out, I sat down at an outdoor table, still holding her in my lap, and she continued screaming and kicking 22 more minutes. (Yes, I timed it.) All the while, all I was telling her to do was listen to her mother, but she refused. Finally she gave up from exhaustion. I don’t know where that girl gets her stubborn streak from (OK, I do, it comes from her mother) but she’s going to have to learn she cannot out-stubborn me.
Once she capitulated, she was all smiles and sunshine again, but that ended our visit to the Chingjing Farm area and we headed towards our next destination: Sun Moon Lake.
To get there, we had to backtrack down the mountain to the town of Puli.
In May 1998 I first met my then to-be father-in-law at Taiwan’s CKS Airport. He picked Irene and I up at the airport in the very same car he has now, and as I shoehorned myself into the car, reeling from heat and humidity like I’d never felt before in my life, I conked my forehead into the passenger side windshield of his car, leaving a greasy stain.
Today I took a kleenex and cleaned that damned stain off the inside of the window. It’s been interfering with my in-car photographs for 7 years now and I just couldn’t take it anymore. Maybe that’s where Michelle gets he stubborn streak from? One of us had to crack and clean that thing and it was finally me.
With a crystal clear (on the inside anyway) windshield, my father-in-law took us to see the “geographic center of Taiwan”. I’m not exactly how you determine something like that. I suppose if you could express the shape of the island’s coastlines as mathematic formulae you could use calculus to determine area and then work it until you had 4 sectors of identical area, the cross-hair point would then be “the center.”
No computer wizardry was used, though, as the marker for the center was placed by the Japanese in the early 1900’s during their occupation period. It’s in a nice little park in Puli.
Pity they were wrong. Later surveys moved the point to the top of the nearby mountain, and so I had to climb to the top to get a GPS reading for it. (N 23˚ 58.541′ E 120˚ 58.432′ , elevation 1856′ if you’re interested in looking it up on Google Earth)
Since I had the GPS out, I used it to track down the coordinates I had recorded (and were still in the GPS) in 2001 for Puli. It lead us unerringly right to the McDonald’s, so there we ate. That’s technology used for its highest purpose: leading you to a meal. (N 23˚ 58.360′ E 120˚ 56.914′)
We’ve been to Sun Moon Lake several times before and we were staying in the same hotel we did last time. It was eccentric, but very nice. It’s owned by an artist who uses it not only as a hotel, but also a meeting place for art discussion groups and to show off her wares. My father-in-law estimated we had another 2.5 hours of driving to get there, but the GPS told me the hotel was less than 9 miles away from Puli. Stranger things can happen in Taiwan where you can drive hours to travel 14 miles, but in this case his estimate was completely off-base, and we arrived via an almost straight line in under an hour.
Last time they were still rebuilding from the devastating 921 Earthquake (which happened September 21, 1999) that had flattened practically everything from the center or the quake near Puli out for miles in every direction, even toppling buildings in Taipei a hundred miles away. This time everything looked pretty much rebuilt and back to business as usual. Of course there were pictures everywhere of buildings that had been destroyed to remind everyone of what had happened.
We arrived pretty much at sunset, so we didn’t do much except walk around the dock before turning in for the night.
Apparently one of the nearby hotels had wireless internet, and if I sat on the bed in just the right position without moving I could catch an internet signal every once and a while to check my e-mail and post some pictures. Naturally with a new camera, I’m taking massive numbers of pictures which I can’t possibly all post to flickr. So far I’m extremely pleased with the camera, but disappointed that everywhere we go is saturated in smuck or clouds.