Taiwan Trip, Day 7

I woke up, once again bright and early the next morning and headed to the train station to catch the train to my next destination. I stopped only to pick up some juice and a bagel from the little window at a cafe that also doubled as a hair salon. The bagels were tasty. I caught the train with no trouble this time. I was bound for a city called Hualien, which was not particularly known for being interesting in and of itself, but which was the easiest stopping off point for a place called Taroko Gorge, one of the premier sightseeing destinations in Taiwan. Basically, Taroko Gorge is a 19 kilometer long canyon composed mostly of granite and marble. The marble gives the cliffs a particularly beautiful look, and the scenery is said to be impressive. I wanted to visit, but I had no car, so decided to do a day trip out of Hualien, rather than staying within the park itself.

It was a fairly long journey from Tainan to Hualien. I took the train, as before. Although the train was nice enough and the scenery was beautiful—steep, verdant tropical looking mountains pushed up against a shining blue sea—the train was a little annoying, because people were louder than on a Japanese train, and the train itself was making a weird whining noise—I began to wonder if it was in my head and I was going deaf or something, but luckily it was really the noise of the train! The journey itself was really quite long, and took most of the day—about 7 hours. I think I had to change trains at Kaohsiung, but don’t quote me on that. By the time I arrived at Hualien, it was late afternoon and I was quite tired. I also had started to realize the problem that would haunt the rest of my trip—I was running out of money, and had no other way to get it. Because of this, I wanted to minimize expenditures. I stayed in a super cheap hotel, near the station—which is quite far from downtown Hualien. Because of this, I hardly saw any of the city—I would have had to take a taxi there, or walked a long way in the dark. The hotel I stayed at was pleasant enough, although like most of the others it was run down and had an inexplicable hole in the wall. It also had a window, though, and a TV with some English language channels.

After getting settled, I went to find out how I could visit Taroko Gorge. Because of lack of transport and lack of time, I decided to go on a bus tour—something I also never do! It turned out to be quite nice, however. I did the basic bus tour put on by the tourist information service—it was just across the street from my hotel. I paid the nice English speaking man there my $10 fee and then went looking for a place to eat. I had very little luck, sadly, and ended up eating at a Taiwanese version of MosBurger... pathetic! Oh well. After that I went back to the hotel to sleep—the tour was leaving early the next day; I think about 8:00.