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.
We drove out to Yeongweol yesterday, which is a small town in the mountains, a couple of hours inland. It was cloudy on the coast, but when we got to Yeongweol it was sunny and really hot.
Driving through the tiny little town, all you see are rafting companies. There must have been at least 20 or 30 different companies, and their parking lots were all full, which meant the river was going to be busy.
I wasn't really sure what to expect. I've gone rafting several times in Canada, and once in Japan, and most of the times the rapids have been pretty good, but I hadn't heard anything about this river.
After getting our helmets, paddles and lifejackets we were crowded into a bus that during the week is used to shuttle kids around to their various after-school classes. We drove for about 20 minutes to the launch site, which was swarming with activity. There were at least 20 rafts putting in every couple of minutes.
We were assigned to a guide, Mingu, who turned out to be a really good guy. On our boat, there was the four of us, and then one other couple, making it a nice small group.
I didn't see any other foreigners on the river the whole trip out of thousands of Koreans, prompting the inevitable, "waegukin ida (it's a foreigner)" from many of the rafters that saw me. Even so, Mingu tried really hard to explain a lot of what he was saying in his very low English. However, a lot of the time I didn't really understand, prompting him to splash me with his paddle in frustration on several occasions.
The rapids were disappointing, as it was mostly just a float down the river, with only one good stretch of rapids. So that's where having a fun guide comes in. He spent a lot of the slow time having us launch each other off the boat, and attacking other rafts. The water temperature was perfect, and a great way to beat the heat.
The scenery was surprisingly beautiful, and relatively untouched. Most of the time you see rivers in Korea, their banks have been concreted, but there was almost no development along this river until the end. Unfortunately, I left my camera in the car, as I didn't want it being damaged.
We only payed 25,000 won each (about $20) for about 3 hours, which I thought was a pretty good deal.
I took this picture on the way up, while we waited in traffic. If it isn't obvious, in the first picture, I'm the guy at the front of the boat on the far right. They had a guy snapping pictures of all the boats as they came in, and then you could buy a copy for $5.
A couple of weeks ago I felt like going for a short hike, so I took a train for about an hour and a half inland to the small town of Taebaek. The provincial park has a few peaks you can climb, so my plan was to climb up one of them and then take the ridge between them to a few more peaks before coming back down.
Unfortunately, the weather didn't cooperate and it started pouring about half way up the mountain. I met a few Koreans coming down, but nobody else was going up. I decided to continue anyways, in the hopes that the clouds might pass. They didn't.
At the top it was pouring and the visibility was only about 50 metres. I thought there might be a small shelter at the top so I could get out of the rain for a bit, but no luck. So I found this rock to hide under while I had a snack.
Because of the poor visibility and the constant rain, I decided to cancel the other peaks. I'll have to come back in the fall.
You can't see the rain in these pictures, but it's coming down hard, and it was cold, so the tank top didn't seem like such a good idea anymore.
Before I left for Japan back in 2005, my buddy Fudge and I spent about 5 months training for the Vancouver Marathon. Even though we trained very hard, the marathon did a number on us. We both managed to finally stumble across the finish line, but we were each in a tremendous amount of pain. We vowed then and there that we'd never, ever, run a marathon again.
Well somehow, back in December last year, I managed to convince Fudge that if I was in Vancouver at the beginning of May this year, we'd run the Half-Marathon together.
As May approached, it looked like I was going to be in South Korea for the marathon, so Fudge was not too consistent in his training.
Well I ended up with more time in Vancouver than expected, which was bad news for Fudge. I spent the last 3 weeks before the Half-Marathon training him like a dog, and he loved every minute of it (although he might disagree.) We went biking, rollerblading and did a ridiculous amount of running. Again, we both stumbled across the finish line in a lot of pain, but it was nothing compared to when we did the Full. However, after we finished this time, he told me he's never running with me again. We'll see.
Okay, admittedly I'm using the word "stalked" a bit loosely, but if I end up disappearing into some cult, sitting around a campfire singing "Kumbaya," never to be seen again, at least this leaves a trail.
I came home from the beach this evening, and found this "Awake" magazine stuffed into my door. It's only in English and there was no Korean version. I am definitely the only non-Korean in the area, and there weren't any in the other doors. There is also a phone number written on the cover, with a Korean's name written beside it (in English). This is the second time I've had English-only Jehovah propaganda in my door. And although I know that this is not really stalking, it does mean that there's a Korean somewhere nearby who has made converting me to the dark side their mission. All I can say is, "Good luck."
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.
