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.

I must say that we were pretty jaded by Sun Moon Lake, and continuing the cheapo fashion, we decided not to pay NT600 each for the cab tour ard the lake as they weren’t particularly impressive.

So a visit to 九族文化村, or Formosa Aboriginal Village nearby ensued. The place, is a pretty grand one in terms of its size. It has a European garden that is about the size of 2 football fields, a relatively big pine garden and a pretty decent amusement park with ok rides. There was of course the main attraction, display villages of the 9 aboriginal tribes in Taiwan. Pretty cheesy i must say, but the place proved to be good one-stop station to get all the info about all 9 tribes, w/o having to travel to remote villages.

Dancers in the morning welcome ceremony
First video of the trip, the welcome ceremony…

The more i watch, the cheesier i think it is…haha!



Clockwise from top left: The “tribal chief”, Interior of a hut, Hut, Pine garden

This place is so freaking big that all the individual village mockups were constructed on a hill slope, and u can take a cable car down from the top of the slope, overlooking the pine garden…


From Left: Cable car, Pine Garden, me saving the wildboar!

What happened after that was a rush back to our hotel to catch the bus back to Shuili, and totally forgetting to take pictures of Sun Moon Lake, best! Tried to take a few artistic pics @ on the train rail.



I like the one with the lady crossing the best..Yes the track was so empty (one train per hr) for me to take these shots slowly. Only at small stations, can u access the track. Other stations would have underpasses or overhead bridges…So we continued back to Ershui, and got a train to Chiahyi, in anticipation of going up Alishan after spending a nite @ Chiahyi.

I would describe Chiahyi as a big town that pretty much has nothing special, except a particular dish which i shall elaborate later. Chiahyi has good and cheap accomodations, a double room for NT500 that comes with TV n hot water.. This was the 1st place where we got the porn channel, whereby everything was mosaic-ed, and best, no sound! Don’t ask me why, I changed channel after 2 mins.

Chiahyi according to Lonely Planet is famous for Turkey Rice, and there was this famous shop called 喷水火鸡饭 which it claims as something that all visitors cannot miss. I was thinking along the lines of you know, roast turkey meat on top of rice..So we walked 1km plus to the shop and we were totally surprised, and disappointed by how it looked…



That’s the dish in the bottom right corner. Shreds of turkey meat on top of plain rice, covered with a light sauce. Nothing impressive, nothing amazing until we tried it.

It was the taste that defined my entire trip, the one thing that i would really miss. My god, it’s totally amazing how nice it is! How the gravy blends with the flavoured rice. Heck! you can do without the turkey meat, i probably would have eaten the rice n gravy on its own…

shit i’m making myself super hungry now!!

The rice, meatball soup and cabbage were washed down by this:

芒果刨冰

I want my 火鸡饭!