Monday, October 7, 2024
Today’s update should be quick, and relatively painless.
Woke up at 2:30 AM, starving. Had some chips and went back to bed.
At 7:00 AM, I didn’t even make a show of going to the hotel lobby for breakfast. I let Chuwan get her “free” food while I waited in the room. Afterward, we went to Sukiya. Sukiya is more or less a clone of Yoshinoya. Both are gyudon restaurants and, in fact, Sukiya was founded by a former employee of Yoshinoya. Sukiya now claims to be the largest gyudon chain, surpassing Yoshinoya. I make no statements as to the accuracy of these claims, but I can say this is the first I’ve seen or heard of them before this trip. Their expansion to Taiwan may be relatively recent.
I chose to be a bit bold, and rather than just getting a gyudon bowl, I went with a three-cheese gyudon bowl. This was good, although if I were choosing the three cheeses, parmesan would not be one of them.
My “combo” meal also came with some karaage chicken. All told, it was a good, hearty breakfast for the day’s adventures.
Melz has school at NTNU five days a week, so they could not join us on our mini-vacation. Visiting family in Taipei is fine, but if you’re coming here, get the fuck out of Taipei and see the country.
This time, we chose Sun Moon Lake. We’ve been there before. The first time was back in early 1999. This was just a few months before the 921 Earthquake (Sept 21, 1999) which basically levelled the area, killing 2,500 people and injuring over 11,000 people. The epicenter was very nearby.
We saw the area again afterward, and it was devastated, with collapsed buildings all around the lake. I can report that they’ve rebuilt and improved the area considerably since then.
Why did we choose Sun Moon Lake? We have, pretty much, been to every place in Taiwan over the years, so some recycling is inevitable. Sun Moon Lake was a simple, easy to obtain destination, and it has been many, many years since we were last there.
There was another reason. In the years since I first started coming to Taiwan, bicycling has taken off immensely. From non-existent infrastructure to round-the-island bike routes, the transformation has been incredible. There is a YouTube channel called Taiwan Plus, and they’ve been producing a series about bike rides around Taiwan. I watched one about the round-the-lake ride around Sun Moon Lake, and at only 29 KM and flat, it was a simple enough ride that we could rent bikes (maybe even eBikes) and make the circuit (even if we just puttered along and took all day.)
But we had to get there first. Like all things coming into this trip, Supertyphoon Krathon had originally looked like it was going to roll right over Sun Moon Lake which is in the central mountains. The mountains in Taiwan are steep. (Unimaginably steep and so densely vegetated that I have never been able to get a picture that adequately conveys how damned steep the mountains are. They’re largely impassable and often rise at angles of nearly 80-85º. Typhoons bring on major landslides and block roads and communities for days or weeks at a time. Luckily, Krathon missed Sun Moon Lake.
Near our hotel was a sandwich shop claiming to be Taiwan’s No. 1 Sandwich. Called Hung Rui Chen, there are epic tales online of people buying these sandwiches to take home to Korea, Japan, and other countries. (There’s also a less-than-reassuring story about hundreds of people getting food poisoning from an outlet location in Hong Kong, but I’m just going to blame that on the Red Chinese’s lack of health and safety standards and try to ignore it.)
These sandwiches are not to be believed. They are ham and cheese on crustless white bread, I kid you not. In any case, I picked up two for the train ride to Taichung.
Are they any good? Well, sure, it was fine. The bread was really light and fresh, but… it’s just a packaged ham and cheese sandwich. What was I supposed to expect? The weirdest things get “famous” in Taiwan.
The train ride to Taichung was via the High Speed Rail (HSR). I cannot gush enough about the HSR. It’s fantastic, fast, comfortable, easy to navigate. It’s great.
Why do people always resist them when they’re being built?
Less wonderful was the hour-long bus ride up the mountain from Taichung to Sun Moon Lake. With cramped, uncomfortable seats and a suspension that meant every movement of the wheels was felt in your butt.
Until this point, we’d not had any trouble with our cellular provider, but the quality got bad on the trip up the mountain.
Perhaps I should explain. During my last trip to Taiwan, eSIMS weren’t a thing, or at least they hadn’t caught on yet. My previous phone had a physical SIM and space for one eSIM, but I never got to test it. On prior trips, we had to replace our SIMs with physical SIMs from a local provider, and these had gotten increasingly difficult to obtain.
On the first trip, when we got SIMs, we walked into 7-Eleven and picked up prepaid ones from a shelf. On the second trip, 7-Eleven still had them but wouldn’t sell them to people without a household registration (i.e., foreigners.) We had to go to a cellular phone shop and apply. It got harder for us as foreigners on each trip, although, in theory, foreigners can get SIMs at the airport when they arrive; however, they aren’t open 24 hours, and we never arrive when they’re open.
With the advent of eSIMs, there are now a plethora of apps in the iOS App Store where you can purchase eSIMs for your trips before leaving home. Listening to some recommendations and going with what seemed like the best deal for our trip, we selected Holafly.
For this trip, we selected 15 days of unlimited data. The downside, however, is you don’t get a local phone number. Would this be a problem? Chuwan’s family can call her via Line. We can call each other via FaceTime. I can talk with friends at home via iMessage, except for those poor, benighted souls with Android phones, and for them, I can use my Google voice number.
But what about if someone in Taiwan needs your phone number, or you need to call a business in Taiwan? Would that be a problem? We weren’t sure, but we decided we’d risk it.
Taiwan has amazing cellular coverage, island-wide, and it wasn’t clear why we kept losing the signal. We’d have 5 bars of 5G in one moment, and 10 seconds later, it would be gone. The mountains are steep, and the road is winding, but there seemed to be no rhyme nor reason to the spotty coverage.
When we arrived at the small village of Sun Moon Lake, we found the first drawback: We couldn’t call the hotel to ask for a shuttle to pick us up. We could have re-engaged our Verizon coverage and called from our US phone number, but that automatically incurs a $10/day charge, and Chuwan wouldn’t have that.
We walked the 1 km to the hotel, hauling our luggage.
It’s Day Three, and my back is still killing me. The flight really did a number on me, and walking slowly or standing still is the worst. It doesn’t take long for it to become unbearable. I have meds that can ease the pain, but I don’t like taking them all the time, day in and day out.
We got to the hotel, and it was time for a nap.
The hotel we stayed at was the Sun Moon Lake Hotel, and it was fantastic! (Make sure you get a lake view.) Our room was a Japanese-style room with a living/dining area, two large beds, and a giant soaking tub with views out onto the lake. The hotel is right alongside the lakeside bike pathway, and they offer bikes to the guests for free use.
While the freebie bikes were well-used and not in the best of shape, we took a couple of them into the village and grabbed dinner from the 7-Eleven. This time, I tried a three-cheese hot dog, and the addition of the cheese actually helped mask the odd “wrong meat” flavor of the dog. I also grabbed an instant noodle for later on.
Had a very long, and very welcome to my back, soak in the tub, and turned in for the night, hoping I’d sleep through till morning.