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.

Alishan has 4 wonders: The alpine railway, sunrise, “云海” and pine forest. “云海” occurs in autumn when the heavy cloud cover gets blown in by the winds and they roll, appearing to be like sea waves…hence 云海.. Obviously now not the rite season to see..

Every visitor to Alishan must see the sunrise, it is famous throughout Taiwan. There are 2 places to see from, one is nearby but not guaranteed to have a good sunrise. We paid a tour guide NT300 each to bring us over to Yushan National Park for the sunrise. So at 3.30am we got a morning call and assembled at 4am. By this time, i have only slept barely 2 hours. The cold weather wasn’t helping much actually..

This is the 2nd coldest temp i’ve encountered in my life, coldest is 30 mins later

Taiwanese ppl really impress me with their entrepreneurship, no need to take special modules or courses for them to learn this:

The lady here runs a stall from the back of the van selling hot breakfast @ 3.30am. Prices are not expensive, and like everyone buys from here. Who doesnt wanna drink hot soya bean and eat piping hot toast when the temp’s 11.9 deg. So she’s sure to earn from all the ppl going to see sunrise.

The idiot in me actually forgot to eat my motion sickness medicine, gonna die later.

The entire sunrise team consists of 3-4 guides each driving their own vans or small buses and travelling in a convoy over to Yushan. Along the way we stopped to gaze at stars. It wasnt the most impressive starry nite that i have seen, after sleeping on the roof in Bukkapatna village, India for 18 nites…heh.. But the guide was pretty knowledgeable about constellations and galaxies, what more, he’s got this cool green laser pointer which he used to point out the constellations.

The road was freaking windy, and i managed to puke at a rest station, no surprises here. I’m notorious for motion sickness..haha! but yea puke liaoz, immediately felt better.. I guess it was a combination of lack of sleep, teruk van ride, and steamboat dinner the prev nite… We reached the viewing area, which was really alongside the road after 40 mins.


Spectacular views of the Yushan mountain range @ pre-dawn. I always love this kind of bluish tone. Makes the picture cooler. At this time, the temp was 7 degrees, coldest temp i’ve been in.

Everyone’s here for only 1 purpose

Time for the real action, which only lasted like 1-2 minutes. Guide said that we have to be fast, since we are here to see the sun rising and not the sun that’s already up. Words can’t describe as well as the pics


Sunrise pictures in sequence


Travel Buddies

How can we not have this kind of Marlboro Man photos….

Somehow i pref the pic that i took of ronghua..haha!

Stopped at this along the way back…

It’s a pair of dead trees with one appearing to lean towards the other. Hence they have been named 夫妻树Husband n Wife Trees, and they had perished together in a forest fire in the 70s. Until now still standing tall, albeit dead.

Coming to Yushan/Alishan, you see sights like this so often that you no longer go “wah”

That was the end of the Alishan adventure and we caught a bus down to Chiahyi, where we each bought a pack of turkey rice..heh.. and boarded a travel coach back to Taipei. I tell u, in singapore, Grassland, Super Nice etc all say their buses are super good..blah.. In taiwan, the coach that we took from Chiahyi had the following features

• It costs NT375 for a 3 hr ride
• EVERY seat has a LCD screen in front, with 3 channels
• Speakers are built into your headrest, you barely hear ur neighbour’s
• The backrest tilting function is automated, press button seat goes down, or up
• When approaching destination, driver will press a button that uprights all the seat n wakes u up in the process

Getting back into Taipei, we checked into Taiwanmex 2 this time. Same company, 1 street away. No more cramped room this time. We were located on the 9th storey and we got a 4-man room, 2 double decker beds. The best part is the private bathroom, which was a portaloo located out on the..er..verenda.. so essentially we had a penthouse unit..

Boon Liang arrived that evenning and because he said that he wanted to see Taipei 101, we happily assumed that he’s never been ard Taipei and made plans to explore Taipei for the next few days. We arranged to meet him at Taipei Main Station, and i tell u how shitty that place is. Taipei Main station consists of the MRT station and railway stations. The railway station has 8 exits, one on each side and corner. The MRT station has 8 exits too. There are 3 main underground malls, much like our CityLink. They are Zhongshan Mall, Stationfront Mall, and Taipei City Mall (not sure of name). Each mall has about 12 exits. The main problem is that the malls are not very well integrated. You can’t expect to enter via Zhongshan Mall’s Exit 12 and hope to get to Stationfront Mall’s exit 3, w/o having to pass thru the MRT gantry. So we ended up waiting for boon liang at the wrong place, and the only way thru is to go into the gantry at point A and exit it at point B. Talk about wasting money and time.

We went Ximending, and it was pretty boring if u ask me. The only thing interesting was some of the food…the mian4 xian4 and the pork rib noodles. bloody hell i realised i never took pics of these 2…damnit! Another thing interestign there, some shops actually employ ppl to stand on the throughfares and hold up advertising boards.. There were alot of tattoo parlours there, and arcades only have 2 games..the one that giap toys up with the crane, and the shoot basketball games… sibeh boliao!