Taiwan Trip: Day 2 (21/07/2013)

FuLong by day

Good morning FuLong! Woken up by the sun around 5am, and after a night that was not exactly what you would call “restful”, we got up at 6:45am and got out of the tent to avoid dying of suffocation! Living at the rhythm of the sun is both awesome and necessary, in a country where the sun sets everyday around 6pm; if you want to make the most of the little time you have, you had better play by the rules of Nature and force yourself to get up early, which we did throughout our trip. 

On our way to the TsaoLing Trail

Having completed our “morning deeds”, we set off for the CaoLing Historic Trail. This trail, often written in the Taiwan pinyin as “TsaoLing Historic Trail” (草嶺古道) was praised in both our Lonely Planet and Rough Guide to Taiwan, so there was no way for us to miss it. From behind the overcrowded FuLong train station, last stop for us to buy water and food to carry on the walk, a 5-km concrete road led us to the actual entrance of the trail. Had we known about it earlier, we would have saved about an hour’s completely uninteresting walk and spared liters of body sweat by driving our motorbikes there, although the path was quite steep at some points!

A stunning view as reward! 

Once on the actual trail, there is honestly not much to be amazed by… until you reach the viewing platform. From a relatively shady and rather touristy path, we beat the few hundred meters paved with stairs and reached that absolutely breathtaking roost from which we enjoyed one of our first great views of the Ocean and on Turtle Island (or GuiShan Island, 龜山島) that we kept in sight until we left YiLan County (宜蘭縣). Up there, the weather was cloudy and windy, but the sun was shining heavily in lower altitudes, giving the well-drawn coastline a heavenly look. From there, a way up made of stairs is closed due to bad weather and risks of landslides but it must be worth it to take it if possible and admire the awe-inspiring views it gives. We caught a woman taking furtive pictures of us and started a conversation with her daughter (she could speak English), who clarified that her parents were studying photography and they thought the daring colors of our respective shirts matched perfectly with the scenery!

TianGong Temple

There is a way down to DaLi (大里) and the TianGong Temple (天公廟) but we had to go back to FuLong to get our motorbikes – that might be the only time of the trip when the bikes felt like a burden to us. From FuLong, we drove 25 km along the coast, once again filling our minds with spectacular views upon the Pacific Ocean to the left and the mountains on the right-hand side. You can’t miss the temple, as it is absolutely huge, colorful, and noisy during daytime! Our 2007 edition of Lonely Planet mentioned this site as offering accommodation in exchange for a free donation, so we started looking for people to help us and actually visited the temple on this quest. The temple’s atmosphere is rather weird to us foreigners, at times quiet and spiritual and suddenly loud, heavy and Disney Land-like!

The night descends upon TianGong

Around 5:30pm, we were gratified with a loud five-minute fireworks/firecrackers show (or ceremony) to end up asking a man in a pink polo shirt, who seemingly worked at the temple, for a place to stay overnight. He quickly led us to a rather basic room (although equipped with A/C) with huge beds made of four wooden shelves. At busiest times, around 10 people could probably fit into this room, but we were lucky enough to be alone in the room that night and spread several blankets to make the wood a bit softer to our tired backs.

There isn’t much to do in DaLi at night, so we grabbed beers and snacks at the nearby local convenience store and enjoyed them quietly, facing the Ocean and the full moon that reflected on it, sometimes interrupted by a High Speed train (高鐵) driving by.

At 9:30pm, after eating up our instant noodles on the temple’s terrace, it was time for us to go to bed, hoping the night would be better than the previous one!