Man Man Zou

It’s been almost two weeks since we went to Alishan, but it’s better late than never to write about it.

We made a last minute decision to take a long weekend, because we came upon a rare circumstance of substitutes being available to cover for us. Alishan was an ideal place to visit because we hadn’t been there before, and it’s cherry blossom season.

Last May, we visited Fenchihu, about an hour down from Alishan, and met Charlies there when we stayed at his wonderful homestay. Hoping that he hadn’t forgotten us, we phoned him from Chiayi telling him we were in the area and would love to stay at his place again for a night. His homestay was full, but he managed to do some shuffling and we were able to to stay there anyway. It was so awesome to see him again. He is totally one of the most interesting people I’ve met in Taiwan. We had some tea and just hung out at his place because it was raining. It was a good ol’ relaxing time. He is also the only person who has taken the time to speak Chinese with us (nice and slowly too!). It really helped to show us where we stand with our Chinese abilities- not very good, but improving!

There were two other guys staying there- students from Tainan. They rode their scooters all the way up (about 3 hours drive) in the cold, and even woke up at 3am the next morning to go to Alishan to see the sunrise. They were really funny because at first they acted like they couldn’t speak English, but after they warmed up their abilities, we were soon talking about philosophy, war, relationships, etc… I think it’s like that for a lot of people in Taiwan, they’re just not used to speaking.

We spent the next three days at Alishan, taking hikes around the park to see the cherry blossom trees, along with the zillion other funny attractions in the park (a tree that looks like an elephant, a tree that looks like a phoenix and a dragon, a tree that looks like a heart, sister trees, ancestor trees, lucky trees, two-thousand year old trees,… the list goes on- and they’re all marked on the map and along the paths, so you can’t miss them).

Alishan is famous for its sunrises- often over a sea of clouds. It looks amazing in photos, but unfortunately there was no sea of clouds for us. Every tourist on the mountain wakes up for the sunrise. There’s no point in avoiding it, because it would be impossible to sleep through all the commotion at 5am (Taiwanese sure can think of things to talk about loudly in the morning!).

For the first sunrise (Monday morning), we joined a van tour and went 20km out of town into Yushan park to Tatajia. We stopped at various old trees along the way, and got to Tatajia just in time for the sunrise. The sunrise was ok (and it just happened to be the equinox sunrise), but not as nice as the next morning, in Jhushan.

For the second sunrise, we took a short train ride from our hotel, to Jhushan. The train was packed, which was surprising since it was a weekday. There were mostly seniors though, so I guess it makes sense. The sunrise was great except some idiot used his loudspeaker the entire time during the sunrise (just 4 feet away from me) and talked for a whole 20 minutes straight about stupid things. It was so typical. And to top it all off, when he finally finished talking after the sun rose (I was just about deaf), people even clapped in appreciation- they liked it! Uggg.

So, after taking an easy hike down from Jhushan, we returned to Yuanlin feeling refreshed from the nice clean air.

And now this weekend, we’re off on a school staff trip with Mark’s adult school he teaches at. It should be good, except we have to leave at 8am.