Get out your map of Taiwan and you’ll see one of the principal hard realities of the island: It’s really rough terrain.
We once went to Taipingshan, which is near the city of Ilan. I took a GPS reading and was shocked to discover were were only about 50 miles from “home†in Taipei, and yet the drive was hours. Looking at Google Earth, Ilan and Taipei are only 23 miles apart, but they are (or were) 23 impassable miles, you had to go around the coast, which took a long time.
Finally though, after 15 years of construction and 25 lives lost, the Hsuehshan Tunnel has been completed. 12.9km underground and the fifth longest roadway tunnel in the world, it cuts the travel time to Ilan to under an hour.
It’s only been open one year, and my father-in-law apparently needed an excuse to go through it, so we packed up the car and headed to Ilan.
There’s really nothing to say about Ilan, except that it made Taipei seem cool and dry in comparison.
To give some idea of how much a barrier the mountains are, in Ilan it was blue skies and hot, and when we popped out of the tunnel on the Taipei side, it was grey and in a downpour. The clouds just couldn’t get over the mountains.
The tunnel is nifty, though.