Taiwan - Taroko Gorge

This part of Taiwan gets shaken on a regular basis, but without the shakes rocks still get dislodged from the gorge's wall.  You can hear bits of rock falling on the road around you, the odd one the size of a golf ball. And very sharp edged they are too.  Free  hats available.

Photographs do not do justice to the scale of things here.  The highest sheer cliff above the gorge's bottom is 1 km high.

This image shows the huge lumps of rock that have fallen into the gorge and the blue rock dust in the water that colours the sea around the coast here.  To get the scale of things, on the right, a quarter of the way up the cliff you can just about make out the gash created in the rock face to build the road.

 Chiang Kaishek's son,  Chiang Ching Kuo, had this pagoda built here to honour his mum.

Torrents in the monsoon season scour the sides of the gorge creating, over the millenniums, naturally sculptured forms.

The 2 km Lushui-Holiu Trail built by the Japanese during their occupation of the island in an attempt to subdue the local inhabitants.