Breakfast at Full House is an artist’s breakfast: One designed to keep you starving. It consists of one wafer-thin, sandwich sized slice of ham, an egg and half a banana.
We didn’t get going very early in the morning, so we checked out and headed for a ’round the lake drive.
Recently, back in Phoenix at a used bookstore, I found an old book (published either in the 50’s or 60’s) photographically showing the diversity of Taiwan. The book, called All of Taiwan has no copyright or publisher information. My guess is that it was a government produced inducement to tourists. It is written in Chinese, English and Japanese. Mr. Huang says he has some of these same books (I have another on Taipei only) and that they were published by the Catholic Church. Either way, there’s no declaration of authorship.
As Taiwan is such a changed place, I wanted to visit as many of the places I could and snap a photo of the same subject for comparison. My first subject, a small pagoda on the shores of Sun Moon Lake. Mr. Huang, who seems to have seen everything in Taiwan, knew right where it was.
We parked the the teacher’s hostel (another building largely destroyed by the 921 Earthquake) and followed the trail down to the lakeside. After a couple false starts, we found the pagoda. However, the vantage point that the photo was taken from was obviously completely gone. The only trail approaching the pagoda ran along the lakeshore in either direction, but the photo was obviously taken from an elevated vantage point.
Like all the hills in Taiwan, the elevated vantage point would have been a difficult climb through bamboo and other thick jungle vegetation. I tried to look into the area where the photo must have been taken and I saw a step, half buried and overgrown. With how fast the jungle grows, I couldn’t tell if it had been lost in the earthquake 6 years ago or bypassed years before.
“Just this once”, I said to myself, and started using the bamboo to climb up into the jungle. There were 10 inch ground-dwelling spider-webs all over the place, and Taiwan’s reputation as home to some of the world’s deadliest snakes wasn’t lost up me either. It took nearly 5 minutes to climb to the one remaining step. When I got there it was almost impossible to see the pagoda, but what I could see told me I was almost on exactly the same spot.
I snapped the picture and got out before any of the spiders decided to come out and see if my sandaled toes were tasty. One down, about 50 more pictures to go.
We went to a tea research farm with a commanding view of the lake (still hazy) and went to visit the temple with the world’s largest stone lions. Like everything else, the temple had collapsed in the earthquake and wasn’t yet re-opened last time I was here. It’s now almost completely open, with only some construction work going on in the extreme back. The lions themselves survived.
Instead of heading back to Puli and then on to our next destination, Shitou (or sometimes Hsitou or even Chitou), we took a “shortcut” over the mountains and through some pretty rural areas, down one-lane roads and half-collapsed bridges. We drove past farms growing bananas, grapes, oranges and rice. Mr. Huang stopped to show them to Michelle, much to the consternation of the drivers behind us on the one lane, impossible to pass because you just fall off the road if you try to drive around, road.
We stopped in the town of Shuili for lunch. I had beef noodle soup in a small family restaurant that claimed travel magazines recommended them for their food. They’ve been in that same spot for 50 years. It wasn’t really that good, but I was still hungry from breakfast.
We got back on the main road and headed for Shitou. At this point, the main road wasn’t much different than the shortcuts we’d been taking. It was dirt in places, had more half reconstructed bridges and was blocked by construction in others. I found it difficult to believe this was the main route to what’s been portrayed to me as a major tourist destination in Taiwan.
Shitou is, in fact, almost the last tourist destination in Taiwan that I haven’t been to. We tried to go several times but it’s always been, “Oh the storms washed out the roads”, “Oh, the earthquakes destroyed the roads”, “Oh, the mudslides destroyed the roads” or “Oh, your mother-in-law is afraid of the roads”.
Today there was no earthquake, no typhoon, no mudslides and no mother-in-law. We made it to Shitou.
Shitou has always been explained to me as “The Shitou Bamboo Forest” and from the few pictures I’ve seen it’s a wilderness of real, Gilligan’s Island-style bamboo. The great big stuff that you actually see people build scaffolding out of in Taipei. It’s all around where we’ve been the last two weeks, but not in the apparent quantity of Shitou.
So when we arrived at our hotel (The Mingshan Resort) I was quite surprised that there is no bamboo in sight. Instead, the hotel is a resort located in the prettiest pine forests I’ve yet seen in Taiwan. (They might be spruce or cyprus) Tall, 40 ft lodgepole-type trees abound, surrounding our cabin. Another big surprise is that the ground only slopes about 5 to 10 degrees, making for pleasant strolling. The rocks and the ground are covered in moss and because it’s still tropical, flowers bloom everywhere. A lot of the flowers are landscaped, to be sure, but the effect is still very nice.
It’s not too terribly cold, but is is damp. The humidity must be hovering near 90 percent.
The resort consists of regular hotel rooms and then an area of cabins. The hotel portion looks new and was probably rebuilt after the earthquake. The cabins look like they’ve weathered many a storm. Ours was really nice, with two levels, 2 separate bedrooms and living area. Like every cabin I’ve ever stayed in, there are shortcomings.
In traditional style, shoes were not to be worn inside and the wooden floor was unbelievably cold all the time. The cabin was also extremely damp – more so than outside. In each of the rooms there was a de-humidifier and I turned them both on before we went out to dinner
Irene tells me she choose the resort because it had a Family Mart convenience store on the premises. I don’t know if that’s really the only reason she choose it, but I gotta love her for it. Having a convenience store nearby means a steady supply of something to drink and snacks. It was even more important, Irene’s father felt the hotel restaurant was too expensive and the “town” was closed down, so we ended up eating dinner there.
It’s not as far-fetched as it seems, Taiwanese convenience stores have prepared meals, much as they do in the states, but they have a more elaborate selection. They also cook the food for you rather than having you use the self-service microwaves. I had a nice spaghetti dinner with a hot dog chaser (I was afraid the spaghetti plate wouldn’t be enough) plus part of a loaf of “milk” bread. Mr. Huang tells me that each Family Mart in Taiwan only gets two loaves of this special bread each day.
Only in Taiwan could a story that quirky be true. Sometimes I think they’re desperate to be Japanese.
It was good bread, but I don’t know if it was that good. Still, they only had one loaf and I was curious if tomorrow they’d have two. I determined to buy them if they had them as they would make a good snack on the road.
When we got back the downstairs bathroom floor was soaked and the downstairs bedroom ceiling was leaking water into the middle of the bedroom. We called maintenance who sent over a happy chap with an adjustable wrench. He told us the upstairs dehumidifier was leaking water and that was the cause of the ceiling leak. Solution: Turn off the upstairs dehumidifier. He tinkered around with the downstairs toilet for a couple minutes and happily announced everything was OK.
I couldn’t tell about the toilet, but an 8′ X 8′ section of the ceiling that had obviously been replaced and now was water-stained again told me that the problem with dehumidifier was one of long-standing and I wasn’t too thrilled about the solution.
It’s typical of the Taiwanese, though. Everywhere you go in Taiwan, you’ll see this attitude in their construction. You’ll see elaborate woodwork, tilework or fancy European plumbing that obviously a lot of thought went into, but on closer inspection it’s never finished. The edges are rough or the tiles are cut crooked. I have never once seen a bathtub faucet in Taiwan that wasn’t installed badly. The fixtures are a standard size, but the pipes never come out of the wall the right distance apart or level. Every bathtub faucet I’ve ever seen has complex elbow couplings that can be adjusted to level off the faucet.
It’s as if in everything they build reach a point and go, “Ah, near enough is good enough” and quit for the day. And people wonder why I don’t want to eat in a lot of the restaurants!
Despite my misgivings about the leaking ceiling and toilet, we went to bed. Even Irene had to admit the bed harder than a board. Living in America is making her soft.