No sunrise for you

The plan for this morning was to wake up early, catch a train to the ‘Sunrise Station’ and watch the sun come up over Jade Peak, the highest mountain in Taiwan at 3942 metres. Often the sunrise can be seen with the clouds filling the valley below. The first part of the plan worked well, we woke up at 4 AM and caught the train. Sadly, the weather had the last laugh again and there was only fog. The visibility was about 20 metres and the temperature about 10 degrees, but the train was fun and we talked to some interesting people along the way.

We caught the first train back to the hotel and had breakfast prior to checking out and embarking on the long drive back to Taipei. There a fair bit of ‘wiggly-wiggly’ coming off the mountains and part of the way down we stopped for a Tea Walk’, where you can take a brief… or a long walk through some tea plantations. Of course, we opted for the brief walk. Tea needs to be grown at high elevations, because it doesn’t like a lot of sunlight… not really a problem judging from my last couple of days. It was nice to take in some mountain views and watch the mist roll into the valleys below.

Eventually, we drove down to the valley floor and joined the motorway that took us up the east coast and back to Taipei. There are around 22 Million inhabitants of Taiwan and this is most of them live. It was over 200 KMs of medium to high density apartments, mixed in with industrial and corporate land use. There seems to have been little thought to a coherent town plan, but I suspect that in order to supply basic services to that many people, some sort of plan would have been needed. To put it in perspective, this would be like putting Australia’s whole population into half of Tasmania. We arrived back in Taipei late in the day and I managed to snap the closest we’ll see to a sunset out of the hotel window.

This being our last night in Taipei and Taiwan, we decided that we’d head back to Taipei 101 for  final attempt at taking in a view. We had a magnificent seafood meal that was also beautifully presented. Following some of the ‘set menu’ options of the last few nights it was a welcome change to eat something particularly enjoyable.

We fly out to Seoul tomorrow morning, so maybe a shorter blog tomorrow, but I did want to leave you with some final thoughts about Taiwan and Taipei.

• We only had 3 full days in Taipei. We could have done with an extra day.
• Taiwan has lots of micro-climates, so not all the scenic plans we had, worked out.
• People are very accomodating… even if they don’t speak English they will try to help.
• The food is amazing… often simple is best (Beef Noodles!)

Until tomorrow!