阿里山與日月潭 Ali Mountains and Sun Moon Lake

With another Fulbright friend, I visited Alishan National Park for the first time.  The fog-outlined alpine trees outside our lodge kept reminding me of ski trips, as did being sweaty underneath and slightly damp above multiple layers.  With the altitude, the temperature dropped to the 40s at night, the coldest weather I’ve encountered in Taiwan yet.  I loved the most immersive forest feel of Alishan, complete with fresh mountain air, that other hikes right around Taipei seemed to lack.  We hiked every single trail in the park, including the peak famous for the sunrises above the sea of clouds.  We decided we could hike the whole trail before sunrise, unlike most of the Taiwanese people who smartly take the shuttle...we ended up racing up the trail in order to arrive actually by sunrise.  Unfortunately, it was too cloudy to see anything anyways except white clouds getting brighter white.  Afterwards, we had breakfast and local tea at a teahouse by the summit.  We did two other big summits that day including one in which we found ourselves once again racing up because we were in a time crunch.  We were literally running down the mountain to catch the last bus to Sun Moon Lake.

Sunrise summit

With very sore legs, we woke up for sunrise over Sun Moon Lake prior to a bike ride around it.  The 環潭 around-the-lake cycle has been named one of the top five greatest routes in the world.  It truly was so spectacular, it could make you crash your bike.  There were a couple steep climbs but each rewarded with mountain-top temples.  The rest of the route was right along the lakeside, often on a special cycling path built up right above the water.  When renting the bikes, we first turned down an offer to rent electric bikes to which the man replied that foreigners always want to peddle themselves.

Video about Waste Management in Taiwan

One Health: Understanding Waste Management in Taiwan and Beyond

屏東縣 Pingtung County

Whereas Taipei is a uniquely Asian mega city, Pingtung County reminds me much more of other developing foreign countries I’ve been to.    I started in Pingtung City with my class as part of a field trip to the Pingtung Christian Hospital.  With very developed global health projects ongoing in Malawi and elsewhere, the hospital is an important counterexample to the outdated model of strictly Western nations as “donor countries.”

I stayed for the rest of the weekend in Pingtung County, visiting 潮州, 內埔, 車城, 恆春, and 墾丁, as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant friend from my high school Chinese class lives there.  In Neipu, we went with his other Pingtung County Fulbright teacher friends, to a Thai restaurant, where each table was in its own private gondola on a little stream.

綠豆蒜 sweet soup of mixed beans and rice noodles

In Chaozhou, my friend has a huge room with a private bathroom in a huge modern apartment with a nice kitchen (by Taiwanese standards) for 5000 NTD a month.  For that amount in Taipei, you could maybe get a tiny room with a tiny window, no kitchen, and a shared bathroom.  As well, the weather was amazing, warm and sunny the entire time.  They say their few rainy days parallel the few sunny days in Taipei.  But also there’s so much nothing to do there that we went bowling in a nearby town on Friday night.  The towns where all the Fulbright teachers I met lived had no bars, no cafes, no gyms, and few parks.  Many of them had only beginning level Chinese, so the language combined with limited opportunities to meet locals their age meant that most of their friends were other Fulbright teachers in the county.  Especially currently with no tourists allowed from abroad, there are extremely few other foreigners in the area.

Since it is more rural in the south, no one walks anywhere; everyone rides scooters.  I got to ride my first since being in Taiwan, as my friend and I scooted down the coast to Kenting.  There’s no greater joy than riding on the back of a scooter between mountains and oceans with sunny weather and a cool breeze.

We spent the rest of the weekend in Kenting, which gave me extreme nostalgia for Kona, Hawaii.  It was a smaller town with smaller waves, but surfing in the sunshine always gives me a longing to abandon the rat race of real life.

It is a common thing here for the police to turn on
the lights at clubs and check everyone's IDs

My friend’s indigenous co-teacher invited us to her friend’s club, so we ended up at with free drinks at a VIP table of a nearly empty club with live music and glitz worthy of Las Vegas.

We had an enormous amount of fresh sashimi for very cheap by the Houbi Marina, and we climbed to some scenic lookouts in the Maobitou Park (cats present both in the shape of the rock formations and running around the paths).

新年快樂 Happy New Year

For New Year's Eve, I went to watch the fireworks from the base of Taipei 101, the tallest building in Taiwan from which the fireworks are set off.  In terms of New Year's celebrations, it is the Times Square Plaza of Asia.  People sit in the street hours ahead of time to get the perfect view.  Tons of street vendors sell food and tchotchkes.  It is the one time of the year when the MRT, the Taipei metro system, is open past midnight. It runs for 48 hours straight, and it was incredibly packed the night of the fireworks.  Crowds queued down the block to descend into the closest stations.

As I was deciding whether to go into the heart of Asia to watch live or not, my Taiwanese friends forewarnings ranged from describing it as uncomfortably crowded to absolutely dangerous.  In fact, it was the most peaceful, manageable crowd I've ever been in.  There was almost always room to walk, and no one ever pushed me in the slightest.  The clouds cleared right before midnight to allow all of us up-close a perfect view of the midnight firework show.

Fake snow

Crowds watching from Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall