As you can see from this picture, I made it to the “Pastureland Resort Experience Area” but if you think I’m going to tell you about it straight away, you’ve got another think coming.
It was a long day to get to those cows, and it’s going to be a long blog post to get to the cows.
We started the day in Hualien – which is good because we ended the day before there, also. Hualien is the gateway to the Taroko Gorge, a mind-boggeling chasm wrought by nature out of the magnificent marble cliffs. Impressive but almost completely impassable by humans were it not for an equally impressive feat of manual labor to put a road into it. Taroko Gorge is the start (or end, if you prefer) of a cross-island, cross-mountain “highway” linking the east and west coast, designed originally to facilitate the movement of troops and material across the island in the event of Chinese invasion. By “highway” I actually mean a barely 2 lane road precipitously hacked into the sides of the cliffs.
But I’ve done all that before, so instead we went to the next-chasm-over, which, as far as I can tell has no name, is equally impressive, until recently has been a restricted area so as tourists could not enter and, because of lack of military applications, hasn’t even got a two-lane goat track. It does have a strictly one-lane road hewn into the cliffs for access. I’m told that the area was restricted “to protect the environment” but it’s as plain as can be the real reason is the hydroelectric dam(s) along the river. As the road is just a service road for dam workers, it doesn’t need to be wide enough for two cars to pass. As a road for tourists, it leaves much to be desired. Because of their “conservation efforts” only 600 cars per day are allowed into the area – 300 in the morning, 300 in the afternoon. If the 300 morning cars on the way out met the 300 afternoon cars on the way in it would be absolutely impossible. its a terrifying experience to have to back up along that winding, narrow road (without rails) until you can find a rather optimistically small pull-out. There area equally small and rather long “tunnels” along the way – many of them are just there to keep the overhanging cliffs from falling on you.
It was a harrowing ride, and when we finally convinced him to turn back, he picked another road to follow that was equally as small. Beautiful scenery, but white-knuckle passenger time.
Apart from looking at the scenery, there’s nothing else to do except work your way down to the river, where the water is beautifully clear, but oddly blue-green, and splash around in the gravelly shallows. The kids had a lot of fun and the fish come to eat your feet, which is an odd feeling.
At the “top” of one of the roads is a bridge about 200 to 300 feet high. On either side of the bridge, it was 40ºC and stifling hot. Standing on the bridge, the wind blowing up from the ocean is 10º cooler, at least and at least 30mph. I had an oddly juvenile desire to pee off the bridge (obviously with my back to the wind) but the road ends at the entrance to one of the hydroelectric plants and there’s a security guard on constant duty. You’ll have to settle for this picture off the bridge instead.
The scale of the cliffs is simply impossible to convey with my photographic skills. Time and time again I tried to take photos that would impart the feeling of utter defeat someone would have if they stood in the valley and looked up at the walls around them, but a wall of green just doesn’t look great on camera. I’ve tried various techniques and also shot several panoramas, which I’ll stitch together and post later. Other times I’d find the perfect spot, but there was absolutely no space for me to step outside the car to take the picture. There was quite literally no ground to stand on(!). It’s all very frustrating.
While I pointed out my father-in-law is doing the driving, I forgot to point out (in an affectionate way) how freakin’ annoying his driving is. I think he has entered a phase in his life where he refuses to listen to anyone, and when I say “anyone”, I actually mean people and street signs. It’s bad enough I’m constantly in the dark as to where we are going, but it is quite clear my father-in-law has some vague idea of where he wants to go, but absolutely no idea where it is. If Irene, while looking at the map, says, “turn left”, he’ll say, “I think it’s right” and turn right – followed by us wandering around more and more obscure backstreets until eventually we end up going where Irene indicated. He does the same thing with traffic signs! if they point straight ahead, he’ll turn left or right. I have no clue why he’s doing this, but on more than one occasion I had to pull out the iPhone and Google maps to figure out where the hell we were and to get us back on course. Considering I have no clue where we’re going either, the whole thing is a bit frightening, but mostly frustrating.
Also frustrating is my never-ending battle with food in Taiwan. In Taipei, not only do they have plenty of western food when required, but the quality, diversity and cleanliness of the Chinese restaurants means that I can eat at several places and not appear like one of those westerners that eats at McDonald’s only.
Down in the more rural parts of Taiwan, the story is very different. While restaurants are plentiful, western ones are non-existent and the Taiwanese/Chinese ones are… mostly scary. Cleanliness standards not suitable for a car mechanic’s workshop and a unique tendency to eat the parts of animals we throw away. At the B&B we stayed at, the breakfast was catered and we had a choice of “hamburger”, “club sandwich” or “daikon cakes”
Actually, although my “club” sandwich bore little resemblance to a club sandwich, it wasn’t bad. If I’d been given 3 of them, it would have been a meal. I consisted of something akin to spam, with egg, lettuce, thousand island dressing and, I think, a thin hamburger patty on white bread. The hamburger was egg, lettuce, thousand island dressing and, I think, a thin hamburger patty on a bun.
It wasn’t much to go on and I expected to stop in Hualien to eat before heading into the rift valley. Oh no, we couldn’t go two miles out of our way, instead after touring the nameless chasm, we plunged, food-less into the rift valley.
At lunch we stopped at a rest stop. Bicycling has become a bit of a craze in Taiwan, and there are rest stop cataring to car and bike travelers all over the rift valley. The valley is flat and easy to traverse, so I can see why it would make a good bicycle destination. The rest stop had exactly five food items for sale. Intestines, bamboo shoots, misc vegetables, cold, nasty chicken and pork. The pork is that really interesting Taiwanese pork that seems to be nothing but chopped bones, fat and skin. Somehow they’ve bread pigs with no flesh, just the scraps. I had a bowl of the worst, dullest, driest rice I’ve ever had in my life.
After lunch we went to the nearby Hualien (county, not city) Tourism Sugar Refinery, which turns out isn’t open to tourists expect by reservation, but there’s a small “museum” that best isn’t even recounted, unless you’re a fan of exhibits such as, “This is a typical desk used in the 1950’s, this is a typical phone, this is a typical rolodex, etc.” Mind you, some of the equipment they were using in the 1950’s, we’re still using in AZ state government offices today. What does that tell you about Taiwan or Arizona?
I’ve got very limited internet access and the hotel in Guanshan Township (which narratively, I haven’t arrived at yet) has free wi-fi, so I’m posting this first half of the blog post now. Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten to the cow part, so that will be forthcoming in the next installment. Sorry for getting you all excited about the cows and not delivering. Next time for sure!