Taiwan and homeward bound

Here she comes the 16:50 Taichung to Taipei high speed train.  She travels at 150 miles an hour and a 100 mile journey will  set you back a massive 8 pounds.  Yes, you read that aright,  8 ENGLISH POUNDS STIRLING for a ride on a high speed train some more.

Gorgeous.  I will always love trains.

The next day, fly home to Penang direct, just a 41/2  hour flight. Time to reflect on  our trip. Me thinks we will be back to Taiwan again sometime soon.

Taiwan - Taichung

Our last day in Taichung and waiting for our lift from Shaohung to the high speed train station.

Time to take in the big.

and observe the locals.

Taiwan - Sun Moon Lake

A 90 min bus journey up in to the mountains to the east of Taichung and you will find Sun Moon Lake.  A natural lake, enhanced by a small dam built by the Japanese during their occupation of Taiwan.

Around the shore are a couple of relatively new temples, Buddhist in nature, in including this one called Wenwu Temple.

The art work and stone carvings are quite phenomenal in the detail they show.   Quite extraordinary efforts by some very gifted artists/artisans

But the beauty really is in the lake and it's surrounds.

An hour after this photograph was taken, we had a white out,  completely blanketed in a cloud we became.

Taiwan - Taichung

Rather than drive the twisty road across the country from Hualien to Taichung we opted the fly, garnering us great top down views of the mountain tops, as opposed to the bottom up views from the gorge bottoms.  First night at a sunken park in the city centre.  Totally modern as you can see.

Taiwan - Pacific Coast

For our second day with Micheal, we drove south along the coast almost down to the Tropic of Cancer marker.  This house is built in the grounds of a park where the owner is creating a bit of Europe, such is his love of things European.

 Another art place, here an ex-logging camp with red cypress carvings.

 One of the few safe beaches from which to swim.

 Coffee stop.

The mountains behind Hualien rising to 1500m + 

Taiwan - Taroko Gorge

For our two days by the Pacific we hired Micheal with his car for 8 hours each of the two days. Micheal, a kindred spirit I think having decide to retire at 55 having had enough of the corporate life, hires himself out with car only a couple of times in a month.  He is currently learning to speak English being self taught using CD's, for that alone, I take my hat off to him.

Things you need to know when driving in Taiwan.

1) Apart from driving on the wrong side of the road, the inside lane on the freeway is for undertaking, ie the outside lane is treated as the 'slow' lane:
2) On coming drivers turning across your path will expect right of way. 

If you know the local rules, you can play the game to win.

At the end of this first day with him Micheal took us to a cafe on the coast that serve you coffee with goats milk, the whiff of goat being thrown in for free.  Taiwan is the most un-Chinese looking of places, despite the population being 99% of Chinese origin..  The art and whatever architecture is not just a square concrete box with openings is 'modern'.

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.

Taiwan - Cliffs

The colour of the sea is stunning.

Rock dust in the water washed down  mountain gorges into the sea produces this amazing blue in the Pacific Ocean.  This part of the coast is particularly dangerous for the unwary paddler.  Rough waves have claimed a few lives here. 

Taiwan - Hualien Sculpture Museum.

From Taipei we took a train over to the Pacific coast, to the city of Hualien. Home of jade.

 Art is the theme of this trip, or so it seems.

 Sculpture and carving of all sorts of materials is the Taiwanese artist thing, here in jade.  This piece to around 18 inches high.

Here in wood. All very modern too. 

Taiwan - Jinguashi and Jiufen.

 From Keelung you can take a local service bus to the Jinguashi gold mine, long since depleted.  These mountains are honey combed with 600km of tunnels.

 Guan Gong built large can be seen across the valley.

This gold mine was important enough to the Japanese, who occupied Taiwan for the 50 years up to 1946, to build a special Japanese style lodge for the visiting Crown Prince in 1922.

 Most of the buildings on the site are decaying industrial structures, only the Japanese houses are being looked after. A sadder history of the place is that of a prisoner of war camp to which some of the soldiers captured by the Japanese on the fall of Singapore were sent and worked to death here.  A memorial to those allied soldiers who worked and died here has been set up in the exhibition space.Touching words of remembrance.

After the mine, Jiufen.  Too touristy for my tastes but fine views out towards the sea. 

Taiwan - Behind the Juming Museum

 You could be forgiven for thinking this is a hillside town akin to the villas on Santorini.

But you would be very wrong.

A village, yes, but for the urns of the dead.  The complex stretched for a good half a kilometer or more across the hillside.    These structures looked finer that those for the living. Quite an extraordinary site to see.

Taiwan - Juming Museum

OK, last from Juming.  One of the World of Colours with each large art piece, we are talking 10 foot high here, collages representing the five continents peoples.......I think.

Isaac Newton.  One of the Scientist Series.  You have to wonder what the great man would have made of his imagined  likeness displayed on a Taiwan hill side.

Taiwan - Juming Museum

I feel his work also well observes people.

Away from his military series, the other figures are quite humorous. His work has been exhibited  at the art museum in Singapore and some figures similar to these sat on Orchard road for some time.

 Men in suits.

A 'selfie',  but didn't quite get the angle right, darn it

Taiwan - Juming Museum

Juming, the sculptor of note, set up this park to display his works.

He needed to.  Juming works on a large scale.  These are part of his military series.

His Taiji series is the one that made him famous.

Juming creates in polystyrene foam with the final works in bronze.  All very big.