Monday, January 20, 2003
The good thing about
jet lag is that we wake up early each morning, giving us time to finish the
packing that we didn't accomplish last night.
As we had to catch an
early train to Hualien, I didn't get an opportunity to photograph the
snail's-paced construction of the lantern.
As we drove to the train
station, I saw an interesting billboard. It read: "Architecture is music
frozen, but music isn't architecture melted." I have no idea what it was
for, but it certainly sounded sappy.
The train ride was uneventful and I
spent the three hours working on my daily observations and reading magazines.
Michelle did much better on the train than she did on the airplane. She only
began to scream during the last 15 minutes of the ride.
On my first trip
to Taiwan, Chu-Wan took me to Taroko National Park so that
I could hike down some of the trails, but an ill-timed cold
knocked me out leaving me little else to do but look at
the mountains from the tiny village of Tienshiang. In
Tienshiang there was the newly opened, beautiful resort
hotel the Grand Formosan - Taroko where we spent a couple
hours nursing hot tea and relaxing looking out the enormous
picture window at the spectacular view. We had wanted to
change our plans and stay the night, but our train reservations
couldn't be changed.
Now we were going to spend two nights in the hotel on package
deal, which included transportation from the train station to the hotel. The
bus from the hotel met us promptly and we travelled the harrowing cliff
road.
As I've described before, the road is literally hacked out of the
marble cliffs and are barely two lanes wide - in many places they don't even
make a pretense of two lanes. In addition to being narrow, 100 meterst up from
the river bottom and congested, it also winds constantly around blind curves,
rarely can you see more than 20 meters ahead.
Nonetheless, our bus
driver managed to not only get us to the hotel in one piece, but he also
managed to pass slowpoke cars along the way. Only the spectacular scenery along
the way can distract you from the immediate peril you are always in on the
road.
 The Grand Formosan is
a 5 star hotel and it shows. Our room was fantastic, with
a great picture window and balcony. The bathroom was enormous,
with full-sized tub and separate shower and it too had a
picture window so that you could look out to the scenery. At least, in
theory - the positioning of our room in relation to the rest of the hotel
prevented seeing the mountains from tub, but at least I could watch the
TV in the bedroom.
Of course, the one problem with having glass walls in
your bathroom is that you can see into the tubs of the other rooms
too.
We ate the hotel restaurant from lunch and had a fixed Chinese menu
of wild pig, wild chicken, aboriginal (kind wild) rice and pork chop soup which
was pretty good but had a hefty $11 per person price tag.
One other
family was eating, and their two boys, about 5-6 years old just couldn't keep
away from Michelle. They were fascinated by her, even when she snatched their
stuffed dog away from them and wouldn't give it back.
 After resting, we headed up to the Baiyang Falls trail. Ongoing
construction meant that we had to wait for a designated time to walk up the
road to the trailhead. The hotel checked out flashlights to us, and good thing
too - the trail starts in a tunnel about 380 meters long, with no lights. The
trail leads through several other tunnels until arriving at some falls, and
then eventually a cave which people used to be able to enter and
see the "rain" inside the tunnel - water pouring in from the ceiling, but now it is
unsafe. Nonetheless, I bet Chu-Wan that someone would go in anyway and three
people did. I've noticed "Do Not" signs are largely ignored by the Taiwanese
- except the ones about eating on the Metro. No one seems to ignore those
signs.
As we travelled along, we kept picking up more and more people,
until finally there were about 8 people walking with us. It was a good thing
too, as one group of people gave us a ride back from the trailhead - just in
time, the rain began as we returned to the trailhead and we didn't have any
rain gear.
 I haven't
had a chance to fully review the pictures or video I took on the hike or the
road up, but I think it will be impossible to capture the real nature of the
cliffs. Even with a wide angle attachment on the camera, I cannot get a picture
from top to bottom and it really isn't able to convey that the cliffs are
virtually vertical drops of over a thousand feet.
Dinner was the buffet
at the hotel - mostly the same food as for lunch, but this time all you could
eat, with several other things, such as sushi, salads, etc. The buffet was
$NT650 per person! (US$19!). The two boys from lunch were back at dinner and
constantly hovered around Michelle.
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