I decided to spend my last full day in Taiwan in its capital and biggest city, Taipei. One of the things I wanted to do there was go to the world's tallest building, Taipei 101 (for now, they're finishing a building in Dubai that's taller within the next couple of months.)
It's named 101 (1-o-1) because it has, yes, 101 floors. It's hard to really get a sense of the scale of the building from these pictures, but it's bloody big. The architect designed it to look like a stalk of bamboo.
You can go to an observation deck with a kind of mini-museum on around the 90th floor, for about $13. Apparently it has the world's fastest elevators, and they just shoot you all the way up. The views from the top were quite interesting, even with the smog.
Around the 88th floor, they have this huge yellow ball which is a tuned mass damper. It weighs about 730 tons, and is used to stabilize the building. In front of it, you can see one of the 101's mascots. You'll notice his eyes are 1s and his nose is a 0 - very clever.
I took this picture on my way back to the subway, and you can see how it dwarfs everything around it. It's a little hard to make out in this picture, but if you look closely, near the top of the building, they have a bunch of lights on in some of the rooms arranged to spell "Taiwan" in English.
Korean kids love the word crazy. If I had a dollar for every time I'd heard, "Teacher, she's crazy girl [sic]," or something similar, I'd be a very rich man.
So when I was walking on Orchid Island in Taiwan last month and I saw this hermit crab in a little cave on the side of the road, crazy is the first word that came to mind.
The crab was medium-sized and had taken as its home this plastic cup that looked like a small oil filter for a car.
Below, you can see its buddy, who had a more traditional shell.
After Taroko, I headed down the east coast by train to Taitung, a nice little city that serves as the access point to nearby Green and Orchid Islands.
I'd read that the ferry ride to Orchid Island was brutal, due to really rough water, so I bought a plane ticket for about $45. And the flight was only about 25 minutes, rather than 3 hours on a boat.
The island had a road around its perimeter that was about 37 km long. I considered renting a scooter, but as I didn't have my driver's license with me, nor did I have an international license, I decided not to risk it. There were several police stations on the island, and apparently they had just started cracking down on people not wearing helmets.
So I walked it. It took me about 10 or 11 hours including breaks. Being so far south, the sun was ridiculously intense, and I ended up with a really bad burn. I'm still peeling 2 weeks later.
Everywhere I went on the island I met many university-aged Taiwanese, most of whom were from up near Taipei and were enjoying the last few days of their summer break. They were all incredibly friendly, and many of them spoke very good English.
The island is famous throughout Taiwan for its native people, the Tao. The guidebooks will tell you that they still follow their traditional ways of life. That may be true to some degree for the older people, but like everywhere else in Asia, the younger people don't seem very interested in maintaining their past.
The Tao are known throughout the country for their canoes, which you can see in several of the villages around the island.
The canoe motif is also used a lot on several of their buildings, including this church.
I just got back from a 10 day trip to Taiwan. Originally, I'd planned to go to Borneo, Malaysia, but I found a really cheap flight to Taipei and decided to give it a shot.
My first day I just headed from the airport into Taipei to get some sleep before my early train to Hualien, the main gateway to Taroko Gorge. Taroko is considered one of the must-see natural attractions in Taiwan. Originally, I had planned to save it for another trip, but due to Typhoon Morakot which just passed through Taiwan a couple of weeks ago, I had to change my plans.
From Hualien, I had to take a bus up into the National Park, so I finally got there and started hiking about 1 in the afternoon. I had to catch another train south the next day at lunch time, so I had about 24 hours to cram as much hiking in as I could.
As it was a summer Saturday, I was expecting the park to be overrun with tourists, but it actually wasn't too busy at all. I ended up doing several short hikes, most of them only about 30 minutes to 2-3 hours long.
The water looked unbelievably refreshing and inviting, especially considering the sweltering heat and humidity, but there were signs everywhere prohibiting swimming, or even entering the area next to the river. So I didn't want to be the lone foreigner getting fined by the park rangers.
Along one of the trails I saw several of these huge spiders. This picture doesn't do it justice - that sucker's bigger than my hand.
After a long day of hiking and getting nailed with a rain-shower near the end, I made it to a hostel just outside the park gate. They'd lost my reservation, but fortunately they weren't full so I ended up in a dorm for 12 people all by myself.
It had AC so I was pretty happy. However you can see the "mattresses" which are only 3 or 4 cm thick. I ended up using 3 of them, but it still wasn't very soothing after a hard day of hiking.
I decided to spend my last full day in Taiwan in its capital and biggest city, Taipei. One of the things I wanted to do there was go to the world's tallest building, Taipei 101 (for now, they're finishing a building in Dubai that's taller within the next couple of months.)
Around the 88th floor, they have this huge yellow ball which is a tuned mass damper. It weighs about 730 tons, and is used to stabilize the building. In front of it, you can see one of the 101's mascots. You'll notice his eyes are 1s and his nose is a 0 - very clever.
I took this picture on my way back to the subway, and you can see how it dwarfs everything around it. It's a little hard to make out in this picture, but if you look closely, near the top of the building, they have a bunch of lights on in some of the rooms arranged to spell "Taiwan" in English.
