Long overdue vacation

Hi to all of our readers! Sorry it's been so long since the last entry. I've been sick and working and still more sick. And there hasn't been much to report in a long while, but we finally had a real vacation last weekend.

We had Saturday off for the first time in a couple months, so several people hired a van and we went to Hualien for a couple of days to see the famous Taroko Gorge, which is the place you're supposed to see if you spend any time here. And we could see why.
























The most important thing was being out of the city, and not working. Maybe not in that order. It's hard to tell; but the views were just terrific.

I am trying not to have just blank shots of trees and rocks, but it's hard to go from a feeling of isolation at work for a couple of months in a crowded and busy city, to something in nature that inspires awe, without getting a little stupid about trying to capture the memories for the next month or two and the rest of your life.


















This's a big topo map in the visitor's center. We're in the dark line running up the middle, but the details are a little fuzzy. The little red light near the bottom is a town, so this park, which's most of the topo map, is really big. It's not Yellowstone, but it's plenty big for a couple of days.

As Marie said, "it lived up to the expectations" and I agree.


















We started on a local hike up the river. We were frequently under these overhangs.

Over the weekend I was struck by how in Washington, the conservation corps would go out with shovel and chainsaws to cut trees and keep trails open along the sides of mountains. Here, apparently the trail crews just use dynamite, or artillery. I'm only basing this on how much rock has been cut out, which was an immense amount.
























Marie always looks at me suspiciously when I'm obvious about taking her picture, but she's still cute.


















We also got to meet the locals, like this caterpillar. The long, black antenna are the front. It's hard to take a decent photo of something this small. I think I was still too close. Once you got over the initial shock and surprise, he was kinda cute and fuzzy.


















The water of the river next to the trail was this electric blue where it was deep enough. Fay jumped in. It looks like it should be freezing, like it's meltwater off a glacier, but there aren't any glaciers in the neighborhood, so it's cold, but even Marie put her feet in.


















The entire gorge is a protected park, but it's also kinda like an Indian reservation in the States. The aboriginal people who have lived here for hundreds or thousands of years (I'm not sure of the time) are allowed to use this area to live and grow crops for a living. They grow this plant, which looks a bit like a fern to me, for sale. It's a cultural food so it's making a comeback, apparently.


















Another of the locals. I first thought this was a flying ant. Later I saw a sign warning of poisonous wasps, so that was probably this guy.

I remember when I was little, my dad had a new video camera and he was showing some video of a buffalo in Yellowstone Park. And as we were watching, the video zoomed in until the huge animal filled the TV and it took a few steps towards dad and the camera. Then dad said, "right about here I checked to see how close I was."

I put my foot down next to this guy for comparison, and he started for my foot, but slowly. So I put the camera up, focused, and took the shot. But as the camera takes the shot there's a second where it blinks and there's a blank screen. So I couldn't see the bug around it. I thought of my dad and the buffalo, but on a smaller scale. Smaller creature, much much closer. But I got the shot and I left, if slightly quicker than I might have.


















We started up on the bridge behind us and we walked down a stairway to this trail.

Today was a really easy time. We'd gotten up early to leave Taipei. We still got stuck in traffic, but it wasn't too bad, especially since we had a driver. The drive there is pretty uncomfortable, 'cause it's a very twisty road and even if you don't have to worry about motion sickness, you're always being rattled around like a bingo ball. It's just uncomfortable for several hours. If we visit again, we're going by train or even plane.

In the Gorge the trails are largely made for walking. There isn't a lot of elevation so it's not really much of a hike, which was nice. We found comfortable spots along the way to rest and just watch the scenery and unwind. We played in the river a little, but mostly it was just another place to stop and go, "oooooo, ahhhhh."


















Back up on the bridge there are these lions every few meters. You can just barely see another one behind Marie. The funny thing is, they're all different. Each one is unique, if only by a little, so someone decided to spend some time and money on this bridge.
























This was on our way out of the Gorge to Hualien for the evening. I just loved this tiny little strip of town on the side of the mouth of the Gorge. It reminded me of Virginia or maybe some place in the Olympics. I also think I liked it 'cause of a dearth of traffic. I just love when there isn't traffic.

We spent the night with Adele and Michael. Adele is a coworker of Marie's (and Cat's, Alanna's, and Fay's, so I was the oddball, yay), and she made a terrific Taiwanese-Chinese dinner. Then we crashed on the floor and showered there in the morning. Michael works in Hualien for the Taiwanese Air Force. She visits him on weekends, or something like that. But it was a very nice visit for us.

The next day was much busier. The first thing we did was drive back to the Gorge. Hualien's a decent sized town-city. It's not nearly as big as Taipei, but it's not insignificant. But it's a drive from the Gorge.


















On our way we passed through this cemetary. I mention this partly because the place is amazing and partly because this's the reason we had Saturday off. The translation is "Tomb Sweeping Day" and I've kinda assumed it's like Memorial Day or maybe Day of the Dead. People visit relatives' and ancestors' burial places.

You can see some Christian influences but most everything here, and there's a lot of here, is decidedly not. It's all above ground, and some of these tombs are big. Some aren't, but there's quite a range.

On the left you can see a bunch of rocks holding yellow paper down. Fay called that "underground money" I think. Money for the ancestors and spirits, I gathered. She mentioned there's a collective burning at some point.


















If you look really closely, you can see that the tombs all face different directions. Apparently, there's a Feng Shui expert who knows which way the tomb is supposed to face according to when the person passed away.

But we spent most of our time tooling around finding these walks to go on. They weren't really hikes, but they were still quite impressive. We were also quite pleased that there weren't many people visiting. I thought it'd be busy, since it's a holiday and this place made me think of a junior U.S. parks program. But I guess Marie and I went through Mt. Rushmore just a week before the official summer opening, and it was hardly busy.

I don't think this has the total traffic a place like Mt. Rushmore or Glacier National Park or Yellowstone has, but it's still obvious a lot of work has gone into it, not the least of which is all the tunnels blasted out.


















These signs are about every fifty yards, I'm not kidding. They're very frequent, and obviously in two languages. Tho', as Marie pointed out, they don't want you to linger, but they want you to read the signs. I didn't get a photo of the paragraph long explanation on why you shouldn't linger. That was really funny.

But really quickly, you get kinda inured to the signs.


















Then something like this kinda gets your attention and I realized something hit hard enough to dent a quarter-inch galvanized pipe railing. I took the photo and de-lingered myself.



This was one of the walks we took in the late morning. This's a canyon called Tunnel of the Nine Turns. It's really neat 'cause it used to be a major road through the Gorge, but as other highways made this obsolete, and more people came to visit, they closed this road to all but pedestrian traffic and they dug a bigger road for park traffic farther in the mountain.

It defies comprehesion, how narrow and steep the walls are. It's hard to figure out where to not take photos. It's one of those places where you think the next thing you see is the epitome of the experience, and the next. I love digital film.


















This was one of the rock falls they decided not to clean up. They just put a railing around it and called it good. You can see the rest of the tunnel behind Marie. And on the left is where this smaller tunnel reconnects with the traffic tunnel.
























I think this's one of the best illustrations of A: how ridiculously sheer this whole place is yet absurdly high, and 2: how much they like tunneling. The straight edge in the lower right is a series of columns they put in where they blew out the side of the tunnel. I think, instead of installing expensive and complicated-to-maintain ventilation equipment, they just blew holes out the side of the tunnel. Some of them are yards deep.

I also wonder about how much weight is on one of these tunnels. Even more so when we were walking through several unlighted tunnels. That really discourages lingering.


















This's the other thing they like to do. These little pavilions for no apparent reason. The red is kinda associated with a temple, but there's just a little bench under there. But the weird thing is, there's no way to get to this thing. There used to be a parking lot next to it from that road, and there was a stairway up to it from the left, but they're both blocked. So I don't know how long this little thing's been just sitting there, unused. It makes me wonder about other buildings I see that don't seem to have any access.


















We stopped in the village of Taroko for lunch. I should've taken a photo of the village itself, but I was more interested by where the village was located. Dead center in the photo is another of those tower-pavilions, but this one is definately part of a temple. I nearly got locked in it later in the day.

The rest of the village looks like six buildings transplanted from Taipei. Tho' this parking lot seems to be for a motel to the left that was reminicent of a Holiday Inn, which had bathrooms Cat declared to be, "the nicest bathrooms I've ever been in!" I think she said.


















This was lunch. That's egg and shrimp right there, mushrooms in sauce to the left, then cabbage, then kung pao chicken, which is pretty similar to what we know from the States, then the greens they grow on the other side of the Gorge. Remember the plants I said looked like ferns? That's them, cooked. They kinda have a minty flavor, but that might be the spices, but not bad. Then mountain pig. Mountain pig is gooood.

We all shared this, with a bowl of rice for each. Just spin the table and pick up what you wanna try. This was a combo meal. It was supposed to be for five people, and it fed the six of us. So I feel better about how Chinese recipes say they feed six people, or two Americans. 'Cause this was supposed to be for five Chinese, and it more than fed two Chinese and four Americans.
























This was the high point of the whole trip. We walked a mile or two, through several very long, very dark, very wet tunnels to get to this point. We were on our way to the Tunnel of the Water Curtain.

That's a suspension bridge in the background.


















Here it is, up close. Alanna had a little trouble with it, but she made it there and back. And it was worth it.


















See the bridge above the falls? That's where we came across. See the people? That's how big this thing is. And the noise was amazing. The noise in my video was just rapids. This's a full-bore waterfall.

But I was thinking, "it's really impressive, but it doesn't look much like a curtain, and there were a lot of tunnels, but I was expecting them to be more related." I got way more than I expected.


















This's about as close as I ever want to get to the edge of total fear. We walked through a couple more caves and I led the way into this cave while everyone else was on a potty break.

If you can see the faint light, that's the light from the guy's flashlight. You can just see the shape of the guy to the right of the light. I tried a flash in here, but there's so much water, the camera focused on the water on the lens.

This cave is an outlet for an underground river. The faint streaks you can see running through the light is a waterfall IN the cave. It's like a firehose, several actually, right there ahead of me. Imagine enough water to come up to your shin and five feet across, every second.

I didn't want to step into the water. I could've cared less about soaking my sandals, but I didn't want to walk under that torrent of water. And it was dark. I didn't even think to turn around, which was just as well 'cause I'd already passed a turn that meant there was no outside light.

I moved forward by the light of this guy's flashlight, and by staying on the blocks to the right of the downpour I managed to only get my jacket shell wet, if completely, and my camera (in its case, in my jacket) was undrenched.


















After the run through the cave, the other side was really anticlimactic. It was beautiful and impressive, but you half expected to see the Land That Time Forgot and dinosaurs roaming in the distance and so forth. It was that kinda experience.

This's the crew. That's our driver, Hank, in the blue, then Fay, Cat, Alanna, Marie, and me.

The fun part was going back through the cave.

This time, we did it without light.

The noise was absurd and ridiculous and amazing. Complete and utter white noise blocking anything else. I was the first through, thinking I could help others, somehow. But I got in and realized there was nothing I could do. I got drenched just hugging the wall, and I didn't want to slip 'cause then I might end up on my back in the water. And at one point I was completely blind; there was absolutely no light. I couldn't do anything but feel desperately for the wall and inch the next step forward, which would've been okay, but every other step there's a drip down your neck or spray of water from the hose on your right. It was really distracting.

The worst part was when I could feel myself turning a corner and there was no light from the other end, and more turning and no light and more turning and still no light! It's the longest fifteen seconds I can remember.

Finally out and starting to dry, the walk back was, as usual, much shorter.


















More locals: bats hanging from a cave ceiling. This amused me 'cause a guy with a flashlight must've heard something so he spotted them with his light. But then he left. I pulled out my camera and was literally shooting blindly (pardon the pun) and waiting to see what appeared on my camera's monitor. Love digital. I took a couple of photos with nothing in 'em before I finally found this group again. Kinda my own echo location.

So, those're the highlights. We had a really good time, and I realize now that we let too much time go by without a vacation. So hopefully we'll be able to come up with another little adventure in the next few weeks.