My Travels

A few weeks ago I flew to visit my friend Anita, who spent over a year living, and working as an english editor in Taipei. I loved biking around and exploring Taipei. A bustling city of winding crowded alley ways, and high rise buildings with balchonies tangled with plants. the streets are completly green, but the buildings unpolished and showing their various ages. the roads are filled with not just cars but scooters and bikes as well.

When Anita finshed her job, we went travelling around Taiwan together. we rented a car and she drove us into the mountains. we went on a 3 day hike to a meteor lake, which was beautiful, excilerating and tiring. We stayed in an Bunan village, one of the aboriginal groups that live in Taiwan. there we met a some folk who were having a big party, including slaughtering two pigs, they invited us over and gave us a lot of alchol. it turns oiut they had lead a bunch of school kids on the same hike we had donw and this was the celebration party. the next day we hiked down a canyon, where we waded through a fast flowing river, and scrambled over rocks till we got to a sulfur hotsprings, completly isolated and magical there, time seemed to disappear on us as we sat in the hot springs. This was an amazing leg of the trip, and because Anita has a reasonable amount of manderin we were able to go to some places that aren't easliy accesses by folk who are not from Taiwan.

Anita has written on the first and second days of our hike in more detail on her blog. and I wouldn't be surprized if she keeps writting about our trip so you should check out her blog to see if she posts the rest of the story.

After that we split up for a few days. I took a ferry to an island of the coast of Taiwan, Lyudao Island, or Green Island. I rented a scooter and found a campsite. and spent the next few days exploring. the island has a bunch of caves, rocky and sandy beaches, wild animals like oxen, dear, and goats, the views were pretty much breath taking across the board. The road around the island is about 18km all the way around so it is not that big, but I really liked exploring.

After that I went back to Taipei. kept exploring that city. I am now in Hong Kong, taking it in for the first time, and will soon be leaving for Beijing. I will write more on my travels soon.