This trip to Alishan and Fenchihu happened to be about the same duration as our 1998 trip. We arrived at Alishan late on the first day, took the train down to Fenchihu mid-day the next, returned to Chiayi mid-day the next. On our trip in 2005, we really took the time to explore the Alishan completely, but bypassed Fenchihu.
Fenchihu is a small town, but due to tourism, has more than one hotel. We decided to stay in the same hotel we stayed in last time, but this time we upgraded from a “wood†room to a Japanese tatami room. (In Taiwan, which gets most of its tourists from Japan, it’s not uncommon to have hotel rooms designed specifically for them.) I’ve just always wanted to try a tatami room.
It was a nice room, with a full computer-controlled environment system and 42“ wide-screen hi-definition TV. On that 37†TV we have over 60 channels of the worst reception I’ve ever seen in my life. If nothing else, at least I got to watch an episode of Primeval.
Being in the middle of the week, there were no other guests in the hotel at all.
Apart from being a pleasant escape from the city, we didn’t find much of anything in Fenchihu the first time, but we also felt like we must have missed something. In preparation, I did a flickr search for all photos tagged with “fenchihu.†(I also searched for those tagged with the proper name in Chinese and a couple alternate romanized spellings. What I found were a lot of pictures of the same four or fice things: The railroad tracks, the old steam engines, bian dan, the ticket station, some landmark. There were other things, but the majority of people posting pictures didn’t get beyond 100m from the train station.
This time I decided I was going to make a photo collection of the “real†fenchihu.
Up before anyone else, even most of the locals, I was out on the streets taking pictures. One of the things I like about Taiwan is, when you get to these small towns, if you can get past the broken-down garbage dump nature of a lot of the places is that everything looks so lived in and make do. (I think it’s the look they’re going for with the inside of the Doctor’s TARDIS, although perhaps without so many old plastic bags.)
I personally wouldn’t want to live this way, but I find it fascinating to observe.
As with most things along the Alishan Forest Railway, Fenchihu owes its existence to the lumber industry and the train that brought the lumber down from the mountains. In the old days, Fenchihu was the spot where the trains would switch engines. The next leg of the journey required more powerful engines and when the train arrived in Fenchihu, the stronger engine was up to steam and ready to go.
More recently, the town has erected a museum, of sorts, to bring more railway tourism. The museum, which costs nothing, contains a couple on the old steam engines, a few pieces of the machinery used to work on the engines and lots of pictures. Our hotel provided us with a free tour (Chinese only) which included a lecture on the background of the trains.
Once a year or so, they trot out the old steam engines, which were used from 1912 up until the 1980’s, for the railway buffs. This might or might not be a secret: none of the steam engines work, so they’re retrofitted the inside of one with a diesel engine so it can move around.
The second thing that apparently brings people to Fenchihu is the bian dan. One place in particular is the most famous. As it happens, this also happens to be the hotel we stayed in. The owner is wily old bird. His picture can be spotted in several places around town. Not just his photograph, but professionally done advertisements of the old man, sitting like some old zen master chef contemplating his creation.
Too bad the food didn’t live up to the expectation. The bian dan I got the day before on the train was better.
There are also some (typically) quite steep hills with trails (read: mountain staircases) in the area. The tour guide took Irene and me up a short on the evening we arrived, and I explored another before breakfast.
After we left our room we tried another path that was equally as vertical, this time with the kids. By the time we returned to the train, I was really feeling the pain in my calves.