Wednesday, October 9, 2024
Up at 2:30 AM again.
This time I managed to go back to bed until 5:30 AM.
One of the quirky things about the Taiwanese is an obsession with sunrises. Hotels in the mountains often arrange excursions at insane hours of the day to reach some “famous” vantage point to see the sunrise.
Admittedly, some of them can be stunning. At its peak, the mountain range down the center of Taiwan tops out at nearly 4,000 m, and they rise rapidly out of the Pacific. This presents interesting cloud formations. For example, near Alishan, on some mornings, the mountains rise above a sea of clouds, and, as you’re above the clouds, too, the sunrise is spectacular.
I’m not really motivated to get up for sunrise pictures, and we were nowhere near these epic locations; however, I was awake and realized that we were on west side of the lake, facing eastward. There were low clouds in the air, below the line of mountains, and I thought I might just manage to get an interesting sunrise shot.
I checked the internet for the time of sunrise at our location (5:51 AM), got dressed, lacquered myself with mosquito repellant, and headed down to the lake, camera in hand.
Internet sunrise calculators lie… or at least, they don’t know how to take into account mountains.
At 6:25 AM, the clouds had started to rise, covering the mountains, and the sun popped its desultory face out from behind a mountain. I got a few decent pics.
I failed to mention breakfast yesterday morning. It was a buffet supplied by the hotel but was far more extensive than at our hotel in Taipei. Yesterday, I ate salad, croissants, and quite a few chicken nuggets. This morning, it was croissants and bowls of frosted flakes.
We caught our bus down the mountain at around 11:30 AM. The bus makes a handful of “local” stops for the communities near the top of the route, then makes an uninterrupted trip down through the town of Puli (the epicenter of that 1999 earthquake) and down into the city of Taichung. In Taichung it stops at the High Speed Rail station and then ends at the Low Speed Rail station.
Our train to Taipei wasn’t until after 5:00 PM, and Chuwan wanted to visit the National Taiwan Comics Museum, which is near the old rail station, so we took the bus all the way to the last stop. The museum was 1.7 km away, on foot, but the first order of business was lunch.
The nearby Taroko Mall contained a Saboten Tonkatsu restaurant, and I had an excellent curry katsu for lunch.
YouBike, the bike share system in Taipei has now expanded to many cities in Taiwan, including Taichung. Chuwan wanted to ride from the train station to the museum, which was about 1.7 km.
Up to this point, I hadn’t really given much thought to renting a YouBike. The system has changed since last I was in Taiwan and I hadn’t checked what was needed.
It used to be as simple as tapping your stored value EasyCard (The same card used for buses and subways) on the bike to unlock it and then tapping again once you drop it off.
Chuwan’s EasyCard effortlessly unlocked a bike. Mine was rejected as “unregistered.”
To register an EasyCard, you have to associate it was (you guessed it) a Taiwan phone number. The EasyCard Chuwan was borrowing from her parents had apparently been registered. The card I was borrowing was not. Chuwan returned her bike to the dock, and we set off on foot. (Fear not, intrepid foreign travelers; there is a way to rent YouBikes without a Taiwan phone number. I’ll be sure to document that for you later.)
The National Taiwan Comics Museum looks very Japanese, and it was the grounds that Chuwan was most interested in. Spread over several small Japanese-style houses, the museum is primarily a library of comics that visitors can sit and read. Chuwan checked out a few of the building insides, but they held little interest to me, save for the air conditioning. Taichung is further south than Taipei and right on the coast. It was hotter and more humid, and it was a cloudless, sunny day. I found a shady tree and rested my back.
Satisfied with her visit to the museum, Chuwan and I returned to the train station, caught a local express train to the HSR, and returned to Taipei.
The remainder of our trip will be in Taipei. Rather than check into a hotel, we opted to stay in an Airbnb, which is not “legal” in Taiwan, but they’re all over the place nonetheless. We chose one that was very near Chuwan’s parents (although it’s actually closer to their old home*)
Why are Airbnbs not legal? Well, as we were told, there is no quarter given in Taiwan’s rental laws. If you rent your place to someone else, it must be up to commercial code standards for hotels. How do I feel about that? I don’t know. I can see the point. Rental code notwithstanding, the place we’re renting is awesome.
It’s essentially a studio apartment with room for a bed, sofa, dining room table, and functional kitchenette. It’s also the entire floor of the building. I’m not 100% certain, but I think all six floors are Airbnbs owned by the same person. Access is controlled by a key fob, plus we have a physical key for our room. He’s really gone out of his way to make this nice for travelers.
Since we’d been gone for a couple of days, there was no avoiding dinner with the in-laws; however, they went with a favorite of both Melz and mine: The Emperor’s Happy Pork Chop (Technically, the restaurant is called “Emperor Foods” in English, and they specialize in pork chops. I couldn’t find their website – if they even have one – but I found this review. The place has been there for as long as I’ve been coming to Taiwan.)
It was good, but we were exhausted and soon returned to our Airbnb and slept.
*I mentioned my in-laws “old home.” I should explain. My in-laws own an apartment home in the Songshan district. It was one of several units in a must-story building, but it was aging and housing is at a premium in Taipei.
I don’t know the exact details, but essentially, they got 95% of the people in the building to agree to a deal. A developer tears down their building and replaces it with a newer, better one. Each owner from the original building gets an equal or larger home in the new building. The developer gets to sell the new homes because the new building is several stories taller. Construction, however, will take until 2028. In the interim, my in-laws are given a monthly allowance from the developer to pay for rent elsewhere. This rental place is also close to their old place. It’s all very confusing.
What happened to the 5% who didn’t agree? I think they were forced to agree whether they liked it or not.