Return to Maolin, land of not as many fruit as last time

A couple of weekends ago we went camping at the foot of the mountains in Maolin. I had been there before but this time it was Andrea's first visit to the area and my opportunity to share some of that Maolin magic with her. Unfortunately that magic was in short supply and things turned out ... well, not so good. Andrea got sick, probably food poisoning, and spent hours coming and going between our tent and the bathrooms (which are very nice by the way). She was suffering a terrible headache and I was worried enough to beg for some medicine from some of the other campers. I approached a man near the toilet block whose English was quite good and explained what I wanted. He asked me to wait a minute and walked over to where all the tents were and soon about four different people approached our tent to see if they could help in some way. Taiwanese people are so wonderful in this way - very generous and will go out of their way to help you. One of our fellow campers gave Andrea some medicine which she took. Unfortunately she probably vomited it up ten minutes later, just one of many vomit-trips to the bathroom. All she could do was weather the storm and all I could do was try to get a bit of sleep.

In the morning she was much better but we just wanted to get home and relax. Neither of us had slept well or for long enough and Andrea really just wanted to be somewhere with a real bed. It was a bad bit of luck for us, especially for her, but it could have been worse. As it was we didn't have to go anywhere for breakfast: we were invited to breakfast in a large tent with some of the people who had wanted to help us when Andrea was really sick. She couldn't eat much but at least we didn't have to drive anywhere. She wasn't ready to get on the scooter but by lunchtime she was her regular self again and we headed home.

Our campsite. You can't see all the other tents; very different from the peace and quiet of my last visit.

After we first arrived we drove up into some mountains and enjoyed the scenery.

All that driving tired me out.

This leaf is huge!

On our way home we stopped at the Maiji visitor centre and paid a visit to the Lianshan waterfall. There were hoards of local tourists there and peace and tranquility were just not.

Really nice forested tunnel. I like the sign too: it reminds me of the YHA logo.

The ranges of the "Lunar World" near Tianliao.

The long scooter ride home to Tainan. Even though our bed is not the softest, largest, or most comfortable bed we've ever slept in, we really enjoyed sleeping in it that night. I think we went to bed rather early.