Perfect day in Anza

At the museum of ceramics in Taipei, we saw the “World’s largest vetrified [sic] grinding wheel.”

Pimped out Doraemon mobile (Xiao Ding Dong)

Preparing a Yilan delacacy by pulling sugar.  Can’t remember what these things are called, but it’s basically a burrito with tasty fillings like sugarcane or ice cream.

Super packed street market.

Gooning around in Yilan with some gangsta-old bicycles.

lol wut

Kung fu street fight

45 LONG-SLIDE WITH LASER SIGHTING

The last few days in Taipei have mostly been spent recovering from the Kaoliang incident. I’ve been slowly working my way up to solid foods again, however I am certainly no where near fully recovered.

At some point Jason and I found ourselves in a Taipei pool hall, and eventually a bowling alley. It was very strange to be surrounded by American-made products for a change!

… At a Buddhist temple where there was some sort of event going on. I’m not sure what was up with the dude across the street who had bags full of birds.

Today we went to the Temple Museum and saw all sorts of antique Chinese art (sorry, no cameras allowed inside).  However, on the way there I encountered a mosaiic of a skateboarding Buddha, and I modeled some quality purple drank.

We arrived in Kenting for 2 nights, and started our first day checking out some of the awesome shoreline. We walked on a beachwalk that took us past the “kissing rock” and ended up through an area full of butterflies.

Kenting is tourist-trap central. The entire city consists of one tiny strip, and it pretty much screams Ensenada, Mexico.  Except that instead of taco stands, you have bun and fried-squid-on-a-stick stands.

While the day started with a pretty nice walk, and some really awesome views (especially at “Windy Hill”, except our driver told us it wasn’t particularly windy that day …), the tour quickly went south.

We ended up going to this coastline area, where we paid $200 NT each to take a shuttle ride narrated by a man in Mandarin / Taiwanese. The alure of this particular tour was the rock formations along the coast which are supposed to all resemble animals. He stopped at each rock for a minute or two, for about 15 or so rocks, announcing each rock’s resemblence. “This rock looks like a frog.”  ”This rock looks like an animal that’s upside down with his legs up in the air.”  ”This rock is the largest snail-rock in Taiwan!”  Lame!

This meal … although it didn’t seem like it at the time, was the beginning of the end. This place was just outside of the lame tour we just took, and apparently served seafood that was caught freshly at the shoreline. All of the food we were eating was swimming in tanks live in front of us before we sat down. Rocky times ahead for my intestines …

I have no idea how or why, but this place is out in the middle  of nowhere, and is basically just a pile of rocks.  Except that there are flames shooting up from them (very hard to tell in the pics, sorry). From what I gather there is natural gas pouring out from the surface … and for whatever reason they keep it under check with fire. It was about 20 degrees hotter near the flaming rocks than it was anywhere else.

We ended up checking out the famous Kenting aquarium. It was pretty difficult to get any shots at all in there since they don’t allow flash photogrpahy. One of the highlights included a feeding session where we got to see the gigantic whale shark consume several hundred pounds of food.

Our last real activity in Kenting was a hike through Sheding Nature Park. Here we had a nice 2-or-3 mile hike through some impressive greens, gorges, cliffs (including one gorge where I scurried about 10 feet off the ground like spiderman between the cliff walls).  We finally made it to an observation deck well above the forest where the wind was a bit intense, as you can see by the reaction of my hair.

Kaoliang Jiu. Some may tell you that this is a beverage that people actually enjoy. Those people are filthy liars. In reality, this bottle contains a liquid that can be substituted for rat poison, paint thinner, and/or jet fuel. It took me 3 minutes to realize that it was incompatible with my stomache, and I have been paying the price for that mistake for almost a week. Seriously … terrible!

Today was super low-key and very relaxed.  I greeted the day with a breakfast hambauwow in Taiting. Soon after we waited for the always-late Taitung bus to take us to the train station. I caught up on some desperately needed Z’s, and woke up @ the train station just outside of Kenting.

Kenting is by far the most touristy place we have visited so far, however our adventure here is just getting started.

Will update more later, internet cafe is about to close!

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Taitung is a super cool little city. The smell of sulfer is all over the place, from the natural hot springs. Even our hostel had its hot water pumped in from them, giving us an … interesting … smell after our showers. Although it does feel very good to have water from the hot springs on your skin. Supposedly there are monkeys around town, but we didn’t see any

After a quick bus ride, we had some breakfast and headed over to Jhinben National Forest to check out some botanical gardens and awesome scenery.

We ended up hiking up Brave Man’s Hill, which was essentially a 1500 ft climb up some steep-ass stairs for about 2 miles. We were rewarded by being in some of the must humid jungle surroundings I’ve ever been in, some amazing coverage from huge banyan trees, an awesome view of Taitung, and a rare encounter with “Jungle Uncle“, a Taiwanese man who had a surprisingly good English vocabulary, who hiked with us to the top.

Finally we ended up having dinner in some crazy aboriginal restaurant / kareoke bar, where Pablo Tres got zero-to-wasted off 2 Taiwan Beers and decided make friends with a pot-bellied pig and fire off a crapload of bottle rockets.

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We left Taipei via High Speed Rail to head to Hualien, approximately 100 miles south of Taipei. Public transit in Taipei seriously rocks. I snoozed just about the entire trip down, however it quickly became obvious to me that Taiwan has much much more to offer than the extremely crowded busy streets of Taipei. As the areas became more rural, we saw roads lined with rice paddies, cleaner air, and finally some extremely stunning hillsides.  We had a private driver pick us up, who took us into Taroko National Park.

TAIWANESE FISTPUMP!

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We took another train from Hualien and have finally arrived in Taitung, where I am presently stealing wifi from a neighboring hotel.  Time to crash!

Day 3 in Taipei would be our final day before headed south into Hualien. We started the day off right with some boba (I opted for the milk green tea with tina boba pearls), and I had a killer taro bun w/ fried egg (yutou mantou jia dan).  Grand total for the full breakfast for me was about $1 USD. Jason ended up with a breakfast concoction that he ate out of a bag with some chopsticks which was pretty awesome.

The day was mostly pretty relaxed … It was cloudy again, and Taipei 101 virtually disappeared into the clouds, making for some pretty cool views for me down on the street, and probably some pretty terrible views for the people who paid $400 NT to get up to the top.

After a home-cooked meal prepared by Fontaine’s family friend (which was delicious, and I regretably did not take any photos of!), we headed out for the Lantern Festival, which was just beginning to get underway  to celebrate the end of the Lunar New Year celebration.

I kept encountering Taiwanese girls wearing these light-up horns (to celebrate the Year of the Ox), however, you know the real reason why I like them …  Totally metal!

As is the tradition, we hung up wishes on wires overhead. What we did not know until afterwards was that there were several different types of cards you could pick to hang up for your wish, such as “health,” “love,” “happiness.” The cards we hung up were for fertility.

My wish was, “I wish I could understand how to read Chinese.”

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