This is a daily chronicle of my trip to Taiwan from 9th to 24th May 2006 with Ronghua and partially Boon Liang. I am trying to blog about all 15 days, so it takes time..sorry.. If you wanna read all that have been posted, pls click on Taiwan Adventure category here, or on the left sidebar.

Leaving the hostel @ 7am, we proceeded to Taipei Main Station, and the place looks freaking big.

This was the main atrium and ticketing area, upstairs are the offices of Taiwan Railways. All the tracks in and ard the station are fully underground, they dun emerge @ ground level until the outskirts of the city.

We planned to take a train to Ershui (二水) which is very near to Taichung, before changing to a small train on the Jiji small railway line to this town called Shuili (水里), where we are supposed to find transport to Sun Moon Lake (日月潭). Again, the keyword is supposed, means that we never check in reality, fully trusting the lonely planet guidebook. Ershui is a very small town, or u can call it a big village. We had about 30 mins to grab a quick lunch and explore abit of the shops. RH chanced upon the killer melons.


Politics is everywhere in taiwan..

I thought the small railway line literally means a smaller train, but actually the rail gauge is the same, just that the train’s seats are arranged like the MRT in Singapore, and there’re only 3 cars. No announcements, nobody comes to sell you food in that 40km journey (the trains on the main lines have announcements in mandarin, hokkien, minnan yu, and english sometimes).

Reaching Shuili, we were greeted with a typical japanese landscape.

You can barely make out the mountain in the background, but yea it’s there Shuili was not as quiet as Ershui, and we had like 2 hrs b4 the bus came. So with all our gear on us, we explored the town, entering almost every shop and disturbing many shopkeepers, all in our effort to immerse in culture, no we were not trying to be busybodies.


Clockwise from topleft: Chinese Chewing Gum (槟榔), Shuili market place, Stream @ Shuili, Analogue electricity usage meter, Little boy @ bus station

The bus ride had our ears popping for the 1st time in taiwan, going up the mountain. And what became a common feature in most of our journeys, talking to drivers. This driver, luckily was pretty chatty.. we found out useless bits of info like how much a driver earns, and we told him how much a driver would earn in sg. He told us about betel nut..how it’s grown, and how so many ppl are growing it. He’s got a great biz plan, emply russian and singaporean babes to man betel nut stands along the road leading up to Sun Moon Lake, 包赚 according to him.

I didn’t really like my time at Sun Moon Lake to say the least, the moment we got off the bus, we were surrounded by hotel and tour touts. All were eager to charge us NT600 per pax for round-lake ride on taxi. We weren’t keen. All were eager to charge us 1.5k for 1 nite’s lodgings. Super unkeen. Somehow we ended up sitting next to the lake at this pavillion, thinking about the wiseness of sleeping outdoors there. Eventually we wised up, and got a room for NT1000, and a sucky dinner for dunno how much.
Day 3: 九族文化村 (Aboriginal Theme Park) Chiahyi