To the Coast - Yehliu Geopark

Ok ... made the  blog wider so I can make the pictures bigger.

More scooters ... you can see them piling up in the ScooterBox in front of the cars. Scooters are not allowed to make left turns on busy roads so they have to do jughandles, i.e. turn right onto a minor road and then do a U-Turn and cross the intersection. Another interesting safety-law is that you're not allowed to enter or exit taxi's through the left door.


The guy in the foreground has that classic Harley form ... feet forward, slouched back, no protection and a helmet that leaves the most common impact areas exposed (i.e. face). But he looks happy!

Since this was a vacation for Dave and Yvonne too, we went to the coast! First due east, then up and over the top back west to Taipei. Dave took us down the street to where the locals eat breakfast. We loaded up on a large sack of food items, two or four of each. Everything was breaded and fried in a skillet in unhealthy doses of oil. One item was an omelet ... but breaded and fried. The pork potstickers and buns were excellent, the white carrot cake (not like ours) was ... interesting ... had the consistency and sweetness of sticky rice squares breaded and fried. Then there was a leek/onion/spinach cake, also breaded and fried. Total bill was $6 to feed four people, and we ate about half of what we bought.

We were on our way to Yehliu Geopark. Before you enter the park, like in most 3rd world countries, there is a market where the gov't allows locals to make a living by selling wierd stuff to tourists. We were early risers so we had the place to ourselves.

 Jenn took a picture of some black slimey things in a vacuum sealed bag. No clue what these are. Cobra balls?

Jenn wanted a photo of the giant squiggly CFL's. I like the dried squid in a bag. Or cuttlefish. 

Fish Powder. Get your Fish Powder Right Here! And sardines ... minnows ... plankton?

And here's the actual Yehliu Geopark. It is a peninsula that sticks out into the ocean and has lots of neat geological features. Note the people with umbrellas - they want to stay out of the sun because lighter color skin is considered attractive here. They don't sell sun tan lotion ... but rather, lightening creams! Oh yeah ... we felt like giants. For two weeks we were in the minority, towering over the locals with our freckled skin and non-black non-straight hair. In an attempt to fit in we carries big cameras too.

Jennifer and Yvonne enjoying the hike!

Continuing with my tongue-in-cheek characterizations of differences between the occidental and oriental peoples, we found this bench on the side of the hiking path which was barely a few inches above the path. Yvonne is testing it out. 

Give a girl a camera, and she'll take pictures of bathrooms! Im' glad she did, because this illustrates one of the differences of our societies, i.e. how we pee. This is the women's room. That is a trough. One foot on each side of the trough, drop drawers, squat, and pee. Men's rooms have urinals. 

This is how they poop. Same concept, except that there are (usually) flushing facilities. In airports outside of North America there will frequently be stalls with these, too. Think about it ... how many women actually sit on the bowls in public restrooms? Don't they all hover over the seat anyway?

This rock formation is what makes the park famous - it looks like a queen's head. I don't know who that guy is ... there was a big line to get your picture taken in front of the Head and we didn't feel like waiting so we cut through the line and took his photo with it. It was about 85F with 186% humidity, so it felt like 95F.

More squid! Lots of squid is eaten here.

This is a squid-catching boat. It has lots of huge light bulbs on it and they go out at night. The light attracts the squid in large numbers, then they lower the nets and hoist it in.

First day in Taipei

Check out this fantastic photo of our plane in the sunset which Jennifer captured. This is in Tokyo, as we were about to board our flight to Taiwan.


Oh ... the 12-hour flight from Minneapolis went well, thanks to this REI butt pad. On my previous two trips to Asia I was squirming after a couple hours, as if I were sitting on a crappy stock motorcycle seat. So I figured I'd try that there REI butt pad, and it worked great! No butt fatigue at all. It rolls down to less than the size of a can of pop, and I hardly have to put any air into it to be effective. A couple glasses of wine (because the beer on the plane is crap and makes me pee) and I managed to get some sleep when I wasn't reading Susan Collin's "Hunger Games" on my Nook. 

On our first day we were going to bum around in Taipei (more on that in later posts) and the first thing we saw was this memorial. We pulled in and it turns out it was Chiang Kai-shek's tomb and war memorials for other Taiwanese. 

I don't think there are many building codes in place in Taiwan, or they aren't observed if they exist. I'm all for moderate deregulation, but there some things which are best left for standards organizations to develop and the gov't to enforce. Note how the air conditioners are perched on ledges on the wall above ... and the electrical cables draped haphazardly between units. All of this is right over a busy sidewalk.

Scooters. Lots of scooters here, main the small-wheel variants. They carry all sorts of stuff, even people ;-) Most intersections have boxes painted on the street behind which cars must stop. The box are there for when the scooters filter through traffic at stoplights, and then they race (as much as a scooter can race) in front of traffic. The stoplights have countdown timers so we know how long the red light will last, and on the longer ones (two minutes) we'll see scooterati remove helmets, make phone calls, pet their dogs, eat fruit, drink some water, but the scooter up on a centerstand, etc. Scooters are by far the most efficient means of transportation and parking here, but also very dangerous.

Our first Taiwanese meal was dim sum. I love the steamed dumplings and buns ... I just can't get enough. Here at home I think there's a dim sum restaurant in Apple Valley .... 

Phone Photos

Today I will show you the pictures I had in the phone.

This is a plate of fruit. We went to a local grocery store and Yvonne showed us some exotic fruit. The thing that I am cutting is an apple-banana. It is short and stumpy but otherwise shaped like the bananas we all know and love. Except this one has that slightly tart ester of apples ... and is a little juicier. I wish we could get them here, instead of the Cavendish ones we have.

The star-shaped fruit is Star Fruit. These have a consistency of crispy pineapple, and taste like an apple/cucumber/pineapple mix. 

See the white fruit with little black dots? That's Dragon Fruit. It's very moist yet crisp, like a cucumber, and has a mild and neutral flavor. 

Dragon Roots. They are purchased with a skin on them like a coconut .. in fact, the dish in the photo to the left has some in it. Once peeled, they look like testicles and are slimy like peeled grapes. In fact that they taste like that too. Grapes, not testicles, unless testicles taste like peeled grapes. I don't know and don't intend to find out. Except they don't have much grape flavor. Imagine eating a grape that doesn't have any grape flavor. Unlike testicles, they have a smooth hard nut in the middle shaped like a kidney bean.

Here we are enjoying a Hot Pot. This is essentially a pot on a heating thingy with boiling water and spices. The red side is spicy, the clear side is not. Then we go to a refrigerated display case and select mystery food to lay in the boiling water to cook, and then we eat it. It was generally very good, except when the dumplings turn out to be full of diced squid or whatever. This is primarily a social event though .... that's Dave and Yvonne socializing with Jenn, and I took the picture. Note that the nastyass honey badger isn't here. He don't care, he's still eating cobra.

Jennifer and I went for a walk, and found this exercise area. Here she's using a lateral back roller. Behind her is the perpendicular back roller. They're just black tubes that rotate on steel tubes, with raised bumps on them. Weird.

We went to Starbucks and there was a bunch ... eight maybe? .... Ferrari's parked out front. 

The greater Taipei area has 7 million people. It is the capital of Taiwan (formerly Formosa). It is a thriving, modern and clean city. And nowhere to drive these cars the way they are meant to be driven. I guess going to Starbucks is a consolation.


OH .. on the red apple thing ... see that "Wego" logo? "Wego" is a hotel behind us where the cars drive in and are lifted up to their rooms (I think it has eight - ten floors). Maybe so the boss can take her secretary on clandestine dates.

Not far from Dave and Yvonne's apartment there is a river, and spanning that river is a one-sided bridge. Kind of neat. Along both sides of the river are biking/walking/running trails, with tennis courts and tai chi facilities. We came down here frequently to exercise. Even at 6am there were lots of people here, mostly bicycling. And smoking. We often saw bicyclists in their wicky spandex suits and helmets sitting on a bench puffing away.

 On this particularly windy  Sunday there were sailboats and "sunfish" boats on the river. They were tacking into the wind up and around some markers upriver. 

Under the bridge there were larger boats and little ones going in circles. We think they were learning how to sail. And waaaay over there, under the bridge, was a drum-troupe, which provided us with a soundtrack as we walked.

Boing!

What to do in a 3rd world country? Attach a rubber band to our ankles and jump off a platform 50 feet meters up in the air!

It was quite a rush ... one of the few times in my life I felt the need to yell at the top of my lungs. I was going to imitate some funny Angry Birds sounds, but what came out was much more gutteral.

The jump included a dip in the lake below. I think I went in far enough to get my chest wet.

Weeeeee!

Paul actually went first (I just put my photos first since this is MY blog!) as it was his idea.

And Cresta went last.

New Posts Coming!

We have just returned from our four-country Asian tour and will start blogging shortly. 


This time my blog will have a different format. I won't detail the mundane boring daily list of things we did. Instead, I'll go through our photos in non-chronological order and describe the things we saw. This will be a photo-heavy blog, therefore, if you receive your updates via email without photos you'll want to click the blog link to see the photos.


Just to give y'all an overview of our trip, the idea came about because Paul wanted to "go big" and decided to use his timeshare in Phuket, Thailand. He invited us to join him, which we emphatically took him up on! Then, since we had friends in Taiwan, we incorporated a trip to Taipei into it. We figured out that the least expensive airfare was not to do a three-stop (MSP->TPE->HKT->MSP) but rather a "trip within a trip". We purchased a round-trip ticket from MSP to TPE via Narito (Tokyo), and then another round trip from TPE -> HKT (Phuket). Paul and Cresta (his girlfriend) did the same ... but instead of Taipei, they stayed in Shanghai a couple days. We managed to coordinate things such that our flights from TPE to HKT went through PVG (Shanghai) and we were on the same flight to Thailand as Paul and Cresta. 


I know this is confusing ... so here's the timeline:


Sep. 12: From from Minneapolis to Tokyo to Taipei.
Sep. 18: From from Taipei to Shanghai to Phuket.
Sep. 24: From Phuket to Bangkok to Taipei.
Setp 26: From Taipei to Tokyo to Minneapolis.


The first challenge is that we had to book the tickets in two stages ... i.e. we had to "almost book" the TPE->HKT tickets to see the price ($450 on China Eastern). Then we had to actually book the MSP->TPE tickets and pay for them. Then we had to quickly go back to China Eastern to buy those $450 tickets ... but that's when we ran into problems. We couldn't get them. Their website constantly bailed on us ... and for Paul too. So we tried the USAA (our bank) travel website, and we ran into the same problem. In the end, we ended up paying $800 for each ticket, which increased the cost significantly. Not only that ... since Paul and Cresta were spending more than 48 hours in Shanghai, they needed a tourist visa, at $180/each. This also created confusion for the immigration officials. They wanted proof that we were going to leave China and Taipei, that we had tickets out of the country. However, we had managed to lose our itinerary someplace in Taipei so all we could do was show them my Google calendar on my phone to "prove" we had a flight from Shanghai to Phuket ... and when entering Taipei, we had to "prove" that we were not living in Taipei and that we were flying to the US in a couple days.


Ultimately this worked out well. Stay tuned as we share our trip with you!