Taiwan is not a huge island, it’s about the size of the Netherlands with about a 23 million population most of whom live in the west. We wanted to see the East side and we decided it would be easier to hire a car. Tatjana likes driving so she did it all (of course I’m a named driver just in case!). It also helps she could read some of the road signs. The driving seemed easy and the roads are really good, that’s more than I can say for some of the drivers. Speed limits don’t appear to be adhered to with the way the traffic whizzed past us (but never above 70 mph) and from the other direction we would meet cars and motorbikes bikes on our side of the road. Overall there wasn’t much traffic though.
We traveled up and over the ridge of mountains that sit like a spine down the center of the island. As we climbed to get a view of Fei-ts’ui (thousand island lake) reservoir we also got a glimpse of our first tea plantations. These looked different to Malaysia or India they were in very neat clipped symmetrical rows.
It is fantastically green and lush, every mountain is covered in forests.
We offered a very bemused Taiwanese man a lift up the hill to the view point. His English was non existent and we had to resort to Google translate. Even now I’m not entirely sure if he wanted to go up to the view point! He seemed happy though! We did give him a lift back to the main road so he could catch a bus to somewhere!
Moving further South and East we came into to tea country
We stopped in Pinglin at the tea museum, the bridge had these rather fun finials. In the museum I learned that a Scottish Botanist Robert Fortune had dressed as a Chinese tea merchant and stole some tea plants and seeds from China (because China wouldn’t let him take them at that time). He brought them to Formosa (now Taiwan) in the late 1800’s. These plants were the forerunners of tea now produced all over the Island.
Another thing I learned was that the English tea drinking habit started with Catherine of Braganza the Portuguese Princess (married to Charles II in 1662). She brought tea from Portugal and her partiality to a ‘cuppa’ at the Royal Court made it popular with aristocracy and then finally trickled down to the masses. Tea was already in Britain before this but, it was considered medicinal. Who knew?
Pinglin itself like many towns and villages here, is not very pretty, all grey concrete.
After reaching the coast, the next day we went to take a look! Even the sand here is a concrete colour, which means it gets very hot in the sun. We did a litter pick although it wasn’t too bad. We saw some interesting dead fish washed up, a moray eel (I think) puffer fish and sea urchins.
Of course there are no bins anywhere! Nothing was open because we were early so we left our bag in the managed carpark, hopefully in an obvious place to be collected.
Over the next few days it felt to me that we could easily be in a deserted world. The smaller towns look empty during the day, grey, lifeless and derelict. This was not helped by the things we had earmarked to see being closed quite often, although on Google, (the font of all knowledge) it would show them as open. This seems to be a poorer area too!
Some of the Taiwanese cemeteries were quite interesting to look at. Nearly all a bit overgrown and I don’t think it’s for the wildlife.
Later we saw a number of colossal cement factories that seemed to be removing lime from the riverbeds as well as the mountainsides. However the mountains are so steep that much of the landscape is untouched by humans.
The countryside alternated between river deltas and rock faces. There are tremendously long road tunnels and on one occasion we saw a woman walking through, I can’t imagine what the fumes were like!
We visited a theme park, it was advertised as a Cultural Heritage Center and we thought it may be about the indigenous people. So here we watched what could be considered a pantomime, it was very Chinese!
We also saw a traditional puppet show (no pictures allowed) which was akin to Punch a Judy show to my mind, although the puppets seemed more articulated. Of course we didn’t understand a word! Eighty percent seems to be kicking and fighting!
By now, I was beginning to think that Taiwanese have a strange sense of what is fun or what is beautiful! Later my suspicions were confirmed!
The Travelling Bee 