Feb20 |
My month in Taiwan (part 1) — Taroko National Park |
Taroko (Wikipedia here, nice photos here) is the most popular of the six national parks of Taiwan. Its highlight is Toroko Gorge: steep cliffs rise from a river bed deep down, and far above the mountain road that runs along the gorge. The surrounding mountain are covered by evergreen vegetation, their peaks veiled in clouds.
Taking one of Taiwan’s clean and efficient trains from Taipei to the Eastern town of Hualien takes us about three hours. There, the adventure begins.
Enter our shiny Yamaha scooter. It took us a while to find a scooter rental place with helmets that offer more protection than your average “Hello Kitty” helmet (more on Taiwanese scooter fashion in another post), but eventually we paid a mere 10€ for a scooter, a day’s gasoline, two helmets, and two raincoats. So as you can see in the picture, we were good to go!
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Not exactly fashionable, the aforementioned raincoats weren’t very practical either. On the road they produced a nerve-wrecking noise, which just about drove me insane (and I wasn’t even driving!) — and we still got soaked… well, as you can see in the photos they were at least good for some interesting photos, with Paohui starring as a psychodelic version of Dark Helmet from Spaceballs (Lord Helmchen in German), and me and my backpack as the Hunchback of Notre Dame [update: Paohui thinks I look like a turtle].
Oh, and imagine what fun it is to ride a scooter in the evening along Taroko Gorge! A winding mountain road, on one side a steep stone wall up to the mountain peaks, with signs everywhere warning of falling rocks, on the other side the cliff sharply descending to the river bank at the bottom of Toroko Gorge. Continuous rain, speeding tourist coach busses, and the startingly rapid nightfall combine to produce quite an unsettling experience. Suddenly it made the hotel’s recommendation to stay in town after 5pm look plausible, and us all the more foolish for ignoring it.
Of course, the main attraction here are the many hiking trails, offering great mountain scenery, temples and monasteries.
The most impressive of all, however, was the Eternal Spring Shrine, a haunting reminder of the pioneering spirit that made Taroko into what it is today. After the Japanese defeat in WWII left their plans to connect West and East of the island via Taroko uncompleted, their successors from the Chinese mainland picked up the pieces in 1956. Over the next four years, the toil of thousands of former Kuomintang soldiers carved a road out of the cliffs along Taroko Gorge, which then in 1960 became the Central Cross-Island Highway. The Eternal Spring Shrine was subsequently built to honour those workers (I saw different figures, ranging from 40 to 450) who died during its construction. Visiting the shrine today, the sheer scale and daring of this pioneering work still fills me with awe.
