Wednesday April 28 - Taroko Gorge

Hualien


We arrived in Hualien about eight o’clock on Tuesday night. Sally bought train tickets for the return trip to Taipei on Thursday (which is good since the trains were selling out) and we got in a cab and told him where we needed to go.

The cab driver did what I now understand as the standard procedure when you a cab driver doesn’t know where they need to go. He got us in the cab, headed into traffic and started calling around to see who could direct him to the unknown location. He knew the general direction and headed toward the ocean and then south. And drove and drove. At one point he didn’t want to go any further so he pulled into the space between the our lanes and oncoming traffic and stopped and talked on the phone. This went on a bit longer than I would have liked but eventually we stated driving again and found the B & B.

Our first impressions were not very positive. The room was musty, there weren’t any sheets (just a comforter and the mattress cover), and the bathroom was in bad shape. The first night we decided it was a camping experience.

But the place grew on us because our host was very kind and friendly, the breakfasts were very good and we met Jenny and Phil, the only other guests there who we wound up hiking with through Taroko Gorge on Wednesday.

Just a bit more about Rosestone Inn. Look on their website to see the grounds. It’s a beautiful traditional Taiwanese house with a spectacular collection of plants, paintings, carvings, etc. Unfortunately our host was in the process of running the B&B, raising her two granddaughters, and trying to keep up the buildings and grounds. That was way too much for her to handle (her husband didn’t help) and I accepted that was not a nice hotel but a very unique place in Taiwan with rooms for a few guests.

Trip to Taroko Gorge National Park

When we went to breakfast on Wednesday morning we met Phil and Jenny, a young couple from Broolyn. Jenny was born in Taiwan and is bilingual and Phil, like me, is not real lingual in Chinese. They told us how they tried to explore Taroko Gorge on their own the day before until they ran into several mishaps, like Phil’s backpack being hit by a falling rock as they walked along the road. They said they were going to look for a taxi to tour them through the Gorge.

We told them we had a driver and they were welcome to join us. Shortly afterward Tiffany Zhang, our driver came in. A brisk negotiation began that was mainly carried on between Tiffany and our B&B hosts who told her she charged too much, she should take the two new passengers for free. Poor Tiffany. Tiffany and the rest of us continued the negotiation after we left Rosestone and found some pricing that everyone liked.

The star of the day was Taroko Gorge. I’ve been to Yosemite and the Grand Canyon and I can say that Taroko ranks easily with those places. Basically Taroko Gorge has a fast river running through a marble canyon where the mountains on either side reach 3500 meters. The national park also contains beautiful tributaries rivers like the Shakadong River, a fast moving stream with blue tinted waters framed by twisted limestone formations. There are also several green peaks that we saw looming over us in the mist that are the highest in East Asia.

The group turned out to be very compatible. We really like Phil, Jenny and Tiffany and there was friendly, animated conversation all day. Tiffany figured out early that we wanted to hike so she took us to four hikes during the day. The park was not busy so our walks were usually just Sally, Jenny, Phil and I wandering at our own pace and discovering new things around every turn.

We finished with the walk down the heart of the gorge, the famous Nine Tunnels trail. It was so stunning that you almost forgot there were hundreds of other people walking with you (and often bumping into you and asking you to take pictures, etc.). We did a lot of people watching on that walk as well as Gorge goggleing.

I’ll post pix. Any description that I write would be worthless.

If you’ve ever seen a classical Chinese painting of mountains there’s always a big green mountain with wisps of mists hanging around the top. That’s exactly what it looked like that day because of the frequent periods of light sprinkles and then clearing. Sometimes you could see a mountain, with a higher mountain behind it and then a higher mountain behind that one. Tiffany said it was perfect weather to visit the Gorge.

The gorge is stunningly beautiful but also very dangerous. A young woman was killed a month ago when a rock fell on her head in an area where many people walk and Tiffany had a decent size rock fall and damage her car (which luckily she wasn’t in). Many of the guardrails and warning signs were dented by falling rocks and you could see some huge rocks that had fallen onto what used to be the road. And as I said before, Phil was hit by a small rock the day before we went so this happened all the time. Tiffany got us hard hats and asked us to wear them on some of the walks and we followed the many warning signs as we went. It was sobering to think that if an earthquake happened while we were in the Gorge (there are a lot of earthquakes in Taiwan), we would be lucky to escape injury.

We finished the day wandering through Hualien looking for dinner. We had turned down an invitation to go to a hot springs an hour away with Tiffany, Phil, Jenny and Tiffany’s husband.