Written on 24 August, backposted to align with the date of the events detailed within

Link to relevant gallery: Taipei 2009 trip gallery, with captions on most photos

Flight to TPE:

So, I have to say that flying coach on EVA air is not too shabby. The spacing between seats and size of seats is comparable to United’s Economy Plus. Also, I had an empty seat next to me. I ended up sleeping for most of the flight (in part thanks to a healthy dose of sleepy meds to help me doze off). I also watched a few eps of True Blood Season 1. The food was reasonably good. As usual, dinner was better than breakfast, since I’m not much of one for cheese omelets. I was traveling on this leg with a young(er than me) engineer. The only hiccup we ran into was at SFO. It turns out that, in order to “transfer” between United and EVA, we had to go out to the departures area (on the other side of security), give them our bag tags, and then come back through security to the gate. We’d hoped that we could go to the EVA counter instead of going through security. If we’d been arriving at a more normal hour, that might have been true. However, at midnight, there’s no one at any of the airline counters. I grasped this before walking to the gate, but my travel companion didn’t, and his bags almost didn’t make it onto the plane.

On that note, here’s a tip for anyone doing an inter-airline flight: KEEP TRACK OF YOUR BAGGAGE CLAIM TICKETS! I will admit that I, like most folks I know, usually don’t pay too much attention to where I put my bag tags (the little record that the agent gives you that has your bag’s ID, your name, and your flight numbers). I mean, I don’t trash them until I have my bags, but I also just kind of stuff them somewhere in my carryon without thinking about it. Most of the time, you can claim your bags without ever needing to reference the bag tags. For both this leg and the return trip, I needed those bag tags. Unlike intra-airline transfers, which are handled pretty automatically, an inter-airline transfer requires that the airline “take control” of your bag at the airport. The actual movement of the bag still happens pretty automatically, but the “take control” step only occurs once you personally go tell the airline that these bags are, in fact, yours…and the way you do that is to hand over the bag tag so they can check the ID against the ones they received. If you don’t do this, your bag doesn’t go with you.

Sunday:

We arrived on Sunday morning at 5am. There was a long wait for our luggage, especially when you consider that I took the time to change clothes, brush my teeth, and wash my face in the terminal before going through customs. Customs was the usual routine, but there was a line about ten people long. So, point being, it took at least 30-45 minutes from the point that we landed for the luggage to come out. By the time we were leaving the airport, it was almost 6:30am. The Hyatt’s concierge car took us. We were both feeling pretty good; jet lag hadn’t really presented an issue. We’d both switched ourselves to Taipei time as soon as we got on the plane, and that helps considerably. The ride to the Hyatt was uneventful. We chatted along the way, me supplying a few tips on things to do. The two of us decided to sync up for brunch after we’d gotten checked in and settled. (He wanted to shower; I wanted to unpack.)

I’d investigated a few day trips to do on Sunday, but I hadn’t made any definite plans because I didn’t know how jet lagged I’d be. As it happened, I was feeling pretty good, and I figured the best thing I could do would be to go do something instead of staying home and potentially falling prey to an afternoon nap. So, I decided to do a tour of the Northeast coast that left from the hotel at 1:45pm and cost NT$1100. (NT$1000 = ~$33 US). It was expensive, and I know I could have done more and seen more for less if I’d taken care of transportation on my own. But, considering that I’d be going beyond the MRT routes, I decided that the convenience of a tour was worthwhile. I invited my colleague to join me, and we met a few other business people on the tour. But before that, I was challenged to get lunch. After our 9am breakfast, I’d gone back to the hotel room to change into something that would be good. I also did some tweeting and some netsurfing, as well as reserving our spots on the tour. I also read through my guidebooks to see if there was anything else I wanted to do besides the tour. At around 12:45pm, I walked over to the 101 to get lunch. I had no idea that the 101′s convention center was hosting a giant anime convention that weekend, and as such, the food court was PACKED with teenagers. There were literally no seats available. I got my food and then wandered around for a good 15 minutes trying to find somewhere to sit to eat…and this is Taiwanese lunch, which is not “to go” packaged unless you ask for it, and I didn’t know how to ask for it. (I know now…it’s pronounced tah-eet-show, or taitsho in Japanese romanization, and it basically is what you say if you want your food packaged for carryout.) Finally, a mom and daughter took pity on the lost-looking American and asked me if I “would mind” sitting with them. That was fun, though they knew almost no English and I know very little Mandarin. I scarfed down my food in five minutes so I could run back to the hotel lobby for the 1:45pm tour…confusing the heck out of my table hosts in the process who did not understand why I wasn’t eating my soup. They thought I didn’t like it or thought it was odd. I kept trying to explain that I was simply running late for an appointment and didn’t have time to eat hot soup.

(culture note: In Taiwan, almost all the food that you get from “fast food” counters is like a multi-course set. You can order a la carte, but it’s kind of like how here, McD’s and such have combos, and you usually order a combo, not individual items. Same deal there with “set meals.” So, a set meal usually includes a main course that you select plus an assortment of sides like soup, nuts, sushi, jellies, rice, and/or tea or juice. And a set meal will cost between NT$100 and NT$330…like $3-13, depending on the type of food you’re getting. Beef dishes cost more than chicken dishes, generally. Seafood dishes are the cheapest. And the price to quantity ratio is not at all consistent. I’ve got an example picture of the component containers from a set meal in my photos from this trip.)

The tour was in English, albeit broken and repetitive English; everything was beautiful or very beautiful, i.e., “To your right, abandoned iron factory, notice the small openings for air for the workers, very beautiful. To your left, bay of two colours, result of iron in the water mixing with sea water, very beautiful.” I think it was a good tour, though I wish we’d had a stop at the bay of two colours. The tour description implied a stop, but in reality, it was a drive-by.

Anyways, the first stop after a long drive to the coast was at a rocky outcropping with a very famous (well, famous for Taiwan) rock that is formed from erosion. It has striping that is really pretty, and the landscape ends up looking like melted ice cream because of the erosion’s effect on what was, at some point, a volcanic flow. Also, because of the high iron content in the rock, the coloring is sandy orange. It was kind of tough to climb up to the good vantage point for viewing. I was very glad that I was wearing my river runner sandals and not a sandal with less tread or less flexibility. You really needed to be able to have foot grip on the rock to keep from sliding as you went up or down. There was a definite trail, but, well, in the US, someplace like that would have had a railing or steps built up to it for safety…Taiwan doesn’t care so much for safety or accessibility. It’s your own damn fault if you break an ankle trying to see the pretty rocks.

I had actually broken a toe on the airplane (stubbed it on the seat in front of me at one point when my foot slid unexpectedly), so the grippy walking was even less easy than normal. But, I survived and got some great pictures. My colleague even took a picture of me in front of the rock. It’s rare for me to show up in my own pictures.

After the rocks, we took a very tight switchback road up to Jioufen (sometimes spelled Chiufen or Xiufen…I’m going with the spelling I saw on road signs). On top of the road barely being wide enough for our tour van, the left side had a severe dropoff for the cliff face and the right side had a ditch for water drainage that was cement and just about as wide as a car tire and around 2 feet deep. That part just seemed stupid. The water would flow just as well if the ditch were less wide, so that you wouldn’t have to worry about dropping your tire into it. I wonder if there’s some other reason for it to be that way…maybe so it’s easy to clean out? Anyways, there were several places on the road where there were pull-offs to allow for passing. If we came to another car and we weren’t near a pull-off, there was a little game of chicken to see who would start backing up first…and yes, sometimes we had to back up around a tight switchback turn. It was a bit scary, but our driver did it confidently…and he surely makes this drive and does this several times a week, so who am I to question his ability?

The tour guide noted that Jioufen is a popular day or weekend trip from Taipei, especially on a day like this one when the weather is so nice (it was 88 and breezy). So, we had lots of traffic going up the mountain. At one point, we could see families climbing the mountain on a trail. The guide said it’s very common for people to go up the mountain for an afternoon picnic and then watch the sunset. (She did not say, but I concluded that this means they were going down the mountain in the dark and there was no sign of lighting up there, no power lines. Once again, I must note that the Taiwanese are far braver with their personal safety than we are.) The actual city of Jioufen was pretty small, but we stopped for awhile in a very crowded street market. The entrance to the market had a terrible and pungent smell. It turns out that the first few stalls are for day-old fish delicacies…meaning fish that we would consider rotten….hence the smell. (I did not sample the delicacies.) The other contributor to the smell was that the very next stalls were for sesame candy and milk candy, so you had this rotten fish smell mixing with sweet candy smell mixing with warm milk smell. It was horrid, but thankfully, if you walked fast, it didn’t last long.

We had free time to explore the market and the city. I spotted this camera case/wallet thingie that had Winnie the Pooh on it and a bumblebee pattern that i thought was cute…and, on closer inspection, I noticed that it actually said it was a “Winnie the Pool” product. Ha! Copyright avoidance at work! So, I bought it. I also got some souvenirs for friends. Then, I left the market and explored the city. There were lots of scooter repair shops. I bought a drink at the 7-11 (as noted before, 7-11 is to Taiwan as McDonald’s is to the US…you can find one anywhere, and they all have the same stuff), and I browsed a few art gallery shops in the ritzier section of the town. I also went to a sightseeing point that had shade and a terrific view of the coast. Not long after, we met back up with the tour guide. She led us down, like, a hundred stairs…easily a hundred, maybe more…to meet back up with the van. The stairs were uneven, too, so you really had to watch as you were going down them. But, I did get to see lots of home balcony areas that had cats. The cats watched us; we watched the cats.

Our tour concluded with the requested stop at a Daoist temple and a (silly, pointless) stop at an overpriced souvenir shop that surely gives kickbacks to the tour company. The shop had gifts at what I would call European prices…so it wouldn’t feel overpriced unless you already knew the kind of things you could get in Taipei at the local shops and malls. By the time the tour was done, I was sweaty and tired. It was around 5pm when we got back to the hotel. I spent the rest of the evening just getting my bag set for going to work the next day. I also watched more True Blood episodes and caught up on the recaps from TWoP.