Taiwan Day 4
The next morning, is definitely not a good time to wake me up. Try afternoon.
Pathway to a scenery post behind me.
We said goodbye to our hosts, and left for the summit. We were planning to take the bus, but were hijacked along the way by a van driver who was carrying another couple and promised us cheaper fares and grabbed the bus tickets out of my hand. What he never told us was that we had to stick to a time he had already arranged for the return journey. I hate changing plans at the last minute and will surely keep that lesson in mind the next time I travel. When we reached the top it was sorely disappointing. Feel the commercialness ooze out of every square cm of that area.
We were treated to an aboriginal performance at the railway station. One segment was done to Enya’s Return to Innocence, which everybody has heard. Did you know that the aborigine chant in Enya’s Return to Innocence is not African but actually Taiwanese? It was illegally sampled from the performance of two taiwan aborigine students while they were on cultural exchange. They later settled for some probably obscene amount of cash. Like aborigine groups in other countries however, the groups in Taiwan are not doing very well. Most of the children do badly in government run schools and they have been either pushed out of the lands they used to occupy or reemployed to do labor on those very lands which have now been turned into tourist hotspots. Sad.
Typhoon Morakot, the deadliest typhoon to impact Taiwan in recorded history, destroyed several segments of the Alishan famous forest railway line. This railway line would have brought us from Chiayi to Alishan – several thousand metres above sea level, bypassing different layers of temperate and tropical vegetation. Only two segments were open at the time of our arrival, one taking us to the divine tree, a humongously epic tree which was returned to nature when it was struck by lightning sometime in 1970, and segment going to the sunrise watching platform which we didn’t have time to take.
It was an extremely short ride to the divine tree but it was quite enjoyable and charming to ride a traditional steam driven train. Once we reached the area we were surrounded by giant trees.
Ok maybe they weren’t all that giant after all. Some of them were quite huge though.
Not much to see, lots of trees. Saw a heart shape tree stump and took a successful self shot. Awwww 
Saw a very normal looking pond, and a very cock story.
And thus we moved on, taking random pictures as we went. I think she took better pictures than I did All in all, it was a very small area, which we managed to cover in less than 3 hours.
The tranquil peace was shattered by a horde of Chinese tourists bringing their trademark authentic human vuvuzela sound to Alishan mountain. Run away!
All in all, I would say Alishan is a miss. Come back during one of the cooler seasons where there is the possibility of snow or when the railways are repaired or if you are up for waking up at 4:30 in the morning.
Ok I’m noticing some wierd distortion and compression artifacts especially in Day 4 pictures possibly done on wordpress end. Shall stop here for today and try to fix it tmr.
