Changhua → Douliu → Chiayi → Tainan
I'm on the slow train to Kaohsiung. Today 我又被大雨淋濕了, i am a very wet chicken.
Let's go back to Changhua. In Changhua there is a public bicycle system run by Singapore company Moovo, and it uses the same bikes 摩拜單車 Mobike used to in China. They're not really as sturdy as Youbikes, but i was still able to strap my bag on and cycle the 20 or so kilometers from Changhua city to Yuanlin a bit further down the county.
That stretch of Taiwan is pretty grubby. It's not quite rural and not quite urban, packed with light industry and suspicious-colored canals and rice paddies whose 圳 irrigation i hope is cleaner. But i found a field full of water barrel minions, and an old tree with a shrine next to it, and i biked up the hill to a 塔 pagoda where i was intending to hike the 百果山 Hundred Fruit Mountain. But then i put on my backpack.
It was the worst pain i ever had. Well maybe not ever, but it was up there. My lower back sunburn is at exactly the spot where the pack touches the body, and i think even just a feather touching it would have brought me to tears. So i put my whole pack on my front like a tourist in a night market, and crawled up the 塔 anyway because what even is your life if a pagoda can't make you happy?
I managed to get one selfie where i wasn't grimacing in pain, then made a bee-line to the train station and took the train to Douliu in Yunlin province. There are no public bikes anywhere in Yunlin, and with my back in its sorry state, i decided to chill, do laundry, and (of course) get caught in another epic rain storm.
Douliu was actually quite pleasant. It was just your average smaller Taiwanese town, but still with a Watson's [Hong Kong pharmacy] to buy aloe and a bunch of bustling small restaurants to try. I had a great meal, but more on that in the food post.
Next morning my back wasn't much better, so i jumped back on the train to Chiayi and dropped my bag at a hotel, then got on a Youbike to do a little day trip. I remembered there was a nearby reservoir i liked from last time, but this time i was on a bike so i could go much further. I circled the first reservoir and then cycled on to the next one out in the county. I didn't have the energy to circle it, but came back to the city over a cheerful mountain road.
It was odd when i came down the other side, though. I found myself in one of those suburban wilderness light industrial no man's lands where there are trees and creeks and empty lots and nobody goes there and i got deja vu. It was very strange, until i circled a corner and remembered a weird overgrown sculpture and sure enough i had been here before. It's wild how years later, on a bike instead of on foot, i still end up drawn to the same lonely places. Abandoned corners of town, places that were gonna boom but didn't, or are still languishing in planning limbo, or just were connector roads to go somewhere else but now there's a bigger road so the old connector becomes an oxbow road. I love these weird places in between.
It's why i love bicycle touring too, because you can get out to those places more easily.
The next day i realized that biking was better on my back than walking, because my pants drop down to plumber's crack level and i don't need to wear a pack. So i took a Youbike and cycled to Tainan, not realizing that this one crossed a service boundary that would cost me a chunky fee (over 600NTD or around 20USD).
But before i got the nasty surprise i decided to go out to a part of Tainan i had neglected on my last trip through - the famous salt ponds. They go on for miles and miles, these aquaculture slash polder-looking things with tiny little walkways snaking between them, but because the salt industry died there are loads of abandoned buildings and it's desolate as fuck. It's incredible. Some of the ponds have switched to full blown aquaculture, i guess oysters judging by the huge piles of oyster shells in the nearby villages, but there were plenty of fisherman with rods too. There is some attempt to turn it into a tourist destination, but aside from the giant salt mountain attraction - where cars full of families were lining up to get parking - it seemed mostly like locals, fishermen, birders and some adventurous tourists jumping over the barriers to hike those paths to nowhere to get awesome photos.
Of course, being out in the middle of a salt flat in tropical summer is hot. This whole journey has been brutally hot. Aside from the first day (where i got burned and thus fucked up the comfort level of every subsequent day) it has been below the 36, 37 degree point which i discovered in Colombia is about the limit at which cycling more than a couple hours becomes incredibly tough. But 32, 33 with the kind of humidity we have here, day and night, it's a slog. But it's a good slog. I'd rather be hot than cold any day, especially if there's some sun out.
Oh and those wide vistas, this flat west coast of Taiwan is my jam.
I got to Tainan, frazzled, and got docked the chunky fine for taking the bike out. I decided to spoil myself with a great dinner, although walking back i cut through the more central area of Tainan decided i still hate it. It's the darling city for tourists, it's got a colonial-era oldtown and more accessible parks than any of the other major cities, but it's also full of hipsters and tourists and long lines and high prices and "as featured on TV" and fuck Tainan basically.
-o-
Well, you know, Tainan's fine i suppose. Just, i didn't really like it the first time, didn't really like it this time around either. It's the interesting thing about traveling, so much of what you experience in a place is based on your mood at the time, so not only can you have a shit time at a place lots of people love, or a great time at a place lots of people hate, but also you can revisit the same place and have an opposite experience. Case in point, Changhua. I just went back to read my entry about it and i have absolutely no memory of the night that i wrote about, but apparently i went to a bar and got really drunk and it was great!? This time i embarrassed myself despite speaking relatively fluent Chinese and found the whole place a bit lifeless and depressing.
Maybe just traveling sober is different too. I haven't had a single drink since my holiday started. I am so relaxed i don't have any reason to.
Anyway, i am in Kaohsiung now, but it's getting late after my pause for finding a hotel and eating dinner and doing my flashcards so i'll write more about Tainan and my trip down here later. It features rain, fruit, temples and a canyon. Meanwhile, here's me with some chicks.
Let's go back to Changhua. In Changhua there is a public bicycle system run by Singapore company Moovo, and it uses the same bikes 摩拜單車 Mobike used to in China. They're not really as sturdy as Youbikes, but i was still able to strap my bag on and cycle the 20 or so kilometers from Changhua city to Yuanlin a bit further down the county.
That stretch of Taiwan is pretty grubby. It's not quite rural and not quite urban, packed with light industry and suspicious-colored canals and rice paddies whose 圳 irrigation i hope is cleaner. But i found a field full of water barrel minions, and an old tree with a shrine next to it, and i biked up the hill to a 塔 pagoda where i was intending to hike the 百果山 Hundred Fruit Mountain. But then i put on my backpack.
It was the worst pain i ever had. Well maybe not ever, but it was up there. My lower back sunburn is at exactly the spot where the pack touches the body, and i think even just a feather touching it would have brought me to tears. So i put my whole pack on my front like a tourist in a night market, and crawled up the 塔 anyway because what even is your life if a pagoda can't make you happy?
I managed to get one selfie where i wasn't grimacing in pain, then made a bee-line to the train station and took the train to Douliu in Yunlin province. There are no public bikes anywhere in Yunlin, and with my back in its sorry state, i decided to chill, do laundry, and (of course) get caught in another epic rain storm.
Douliu was actually quite pleasant. It was just your average smaller Taiwanese town, but still with a Watson's [Hong Kong pharmacy] to buy aloe and a bunch of bustling small restaurants to try. I had a great meal, but more on that in the food post.
Next morning my back wasn't much better, so i jumped back on the train to Chiayi and dropped my bag at a hotel, then got on a Youbike to do a little day trip. I remembered there was a nearby reservoir i liked from last time, but this time i was on a bike so i could go much further. I circled the first reservoir and then cycled on to the next one out in the county. I didn't have the energy to circle it, but came back to the city over a cheerful mountain road.
It was odd when i came down the other side, though. I found myself in one of those suburban wilderness light industrial no man's lands where there are trees and creeks and empty lots and nobody goes there and i got deja vu. It was very strange, until i circled a corner and remembered a weird overgrown sculpture and sure enough i had been here before. It's wild how years later, on a bike instead of on foot, i still end up drawn to the same lonely places. Abandoned corners of town, places that were gonna boom but didn't, or are still languishing in planning limbo, or just were connector roads to go somewhere else but now there's a bigger road so the old connector becomes an oxbow road. I love these weird places in between.
It's why i love bicycle touring too, because you can get out to those places more easily.
The next day i realized that biking was better on my back than walking, because my pants drop down to plumber's crack level and i don't need to wear a pack. So i took a Youbike and cycled to Tainan, not realizing that this one crossed a service boundary that would cost me a chunky fee (over 600NTD or around 20USD).
But before i got the nasty surprise i decided to go out to a part of Tainan i had neglected on my last trip through - the famous salt ponds. They go on for miles and miles, these aquaculture slash polder-looking things with tiny little walkways snaking between them, but because the salt industry died there are loads of abandoned buildings and it's desolate as fuck. It's incredible. Some of the ponds have switched to full blown aquaculture, i guess oysters judging by the huge piles of oyster shells in the nearby villages, but there were plenty of fisherman with rods too. There is some attempt to turn it into a tourist destination, but aside from the giant salt mountain attraction - where cars full of families were lining up to get parking - it seemed mostly like locals, fishermen, birders and some adventurous tourists jumping over the barriers to hike those paths to nowhere to get awesome photos.
Of course, being out in the middle of a salt flat in tropical summer is hot. This whole journey has been brutally hot. Aside from the first day (where i got burned and thus fucked up the comfort level of every subsequent day) it has been below the 36, 37 degree point which i discovered in Colombia is about the limit at which cycling more than a couple hours becomes incredibly tough. But 32, 33 with the kind of humidity we have here, day and night, it's a slog. But it's a good slog. I'd rather be hot than cold any day, especially if there's some sun out.
Oh and those wide vistas, this flat west coast of Taiwan is my jam.
I got to Tainan, frazzled, and got docked the chunky fine for taking the bike out. I decided to spoil myself with a great dinner, although walking back i cut through the more central area of Tainan decided i still hate it. It's the darling city for tourists, it's got a colonial-era oldtown and more accessible parks than any of the other major cities, but it's also full of hipsters and tourists and long lines and high prices and "as featured on TV" and fuck Tainan basically.
-o-
Well, you know, Tainan's fine i suppose. Just, i didn't really like it the first time, didn't really like it this time around either. It's the interesting thing about traveling, so much of what you experience in a place is based on your mood at the time, so not only can you have a shit time at a place lots of people love, or a great time at a place lots of people hate, but also you can revisit the same place and have an opposite experience. Case in point, Changhua. I just went back to read my entry about it and i have absolutely no memory of the night that i wrote about, but apparently i went to a bar and got really drunk and it was great!? This time i embarrassed myself despite speaking relatively fluent Chinese and found the whole place a bit lifeless and depressing.
Maybe just traveling sober is different too. I haven't had a single drink since my holiday started. I am so relaxed i don't have any reason to.
Anyway, i am in Kaohsiung now, but it's getting late after my pause for finding a hotel and eating dinner and doing my flashcards so i'll write more about Tainan and my trip down here later. It features rain, fruit, temples and a canyon. Meanwhile, here's me with some chicks.