Taiwan's Southern Cross-Island Highway: Day 3 - Tianchih to Taidong

On Tuesday morning I awoke to a still and silent world, the sun not yet having broken the night.  I immediately began packing my belongings away, keen to make the most of the day but also having little to do and not wanting to hang around for long at Jhongjhihguan with only the wind and the spiders and slugs for company.  Breakfast consisted of my only food stuff - the other equally unripe peach - and equal to its predecessor, it was similarly bitter on one side and after eating as much of it as I could I found a new and final resting place for it somewhere at the bottom of the gorge.  My water was quite cold but as much as I dislike drinking very cold water I drank half of what remained, leaving a few mouthfuls to get me over the mountain.  When everything was ready I rolled my bicycle out of the bathrooms and up the ramp and back onto the Southern Cross-Island Highway (SCIH).

The tipping point of the SCIH is the Yakou Tunnel.  It is the highest point of the journey and if you can get that far then the rest is downhill - except for the uphill bits.  Generally, any speed demon will get a thrill out of coming down from the Yakou Tunnel.  But it still lay eleven kilometers ahead of me and so I put one foot in front of the other and made my gear wheels turn and, slowly, I began to move up along the road.

The stretch of the SCIH between Jhongjhihguan and Yakou proved to be the hardest part of the journey, for reasons apart from the incline: I hadn’t eaten a proper dinner or breakfast; I was running out of water; I was feeling the fatigue brought on by the previous day’s cycle; and I was also rather cold and alone.  The road was in a terrible condition in places: broken, torn, pock-marked, or just plain absent.  In most of the places where the road had been washed away by heavy run-off, construction workers had filled in the gap with dirt and rocks to form a rough and ready surface.  It was still too rough for me on my bicycle with thin tires however, and just like on the previous day, my progress consisted of a series of episodes of walking alongside my bicycle while pushing it uphill, punctuated by very short stints riding it on level roadway (but almost never any more declining roadway).

My best photo of a monkey.  They're quite skittish.

On a couple of occasions I rounded a bend and caught monkeys disappearing into the jungle.  Sometimes I would hear them scampering around in the trees up on the cliffs above the highway.  I was hoping that they hadn’t learned to throw things at people.

The concrete shoulder of the road is still in place, marking the level of where the road used to be.  The temporary road of rubble and soil is not a good surface for bicycles with thin tires.

The falling water looks nice but you can see the broken road at the bottom of the photo.  I think the course of this runoff was changed by typhoon damage and now it runs onto the road.

The lack of food and water, the cold, the hard sleep I had had, and the weight of all the small uncertainties gathering at the back of my mind all took their toll and I began to feel quite vague and not quite my normal self.   I began to hope that the Yakou Tunnel was just around every next bend and was consequently frequently disappointed.  But more than anything I just kept going.  There was nothing over on the left side of the road but clean mountain air filling the void above the valley far below.  On the right, cliffs and mountain sides loomed over me, jutting out and receding as I traced the highway up into the sky.

 Lichens and mosses.

A particularly bad landslide.  This one must be very recent.  The road had been made passable after earlier damage and then further land slippage has made it impassable again.  Note the black and yellow concrete barrier in the distant bottom-left of the photo.  I had to pass it so I took the rack and panniers off my bicycle and carried them across to the other side.  Then I returned to carry my bicycle across.  On the other side I put them together again and plodded on.

The western mouth of the Yakou Tunnel.

At last I wearily turned a tight corner of the road to see the black mouth of the tunnel gaping at me from under the top of the mountain.  I approached and paused before the portal.  It was pitch black inside and I couldn’t see the other end.  The electricity for the lights inside had either been turned off or cut off and what remained was a permanent black void where people no longer came.  It may as well have been a black hole.  Of course, turning back was not an option and so, after completing the pause to gather my thoughts, I took the first few tentative steps into the darkness and uncertainty, suffused with the keen sense that all of the journey that had come before had been merely preparing me for this leap of faith.

I stared into black nothing.  Small, strange noises echoed around inside.  Water dripping, trickling from somewhere to somewhere.  After a short while I remembered that I had lights with me and I turned on both my LED head lamp and my front bicycle light but they made a negligible improvement.  I adjusted the bicycle light to point at the ground directly in front of my bicycle, hoping to see and avoid walking into a pool of nasty black water.  The ground felt uneven in places and I walked on rubble.  Would animals take shelter in a quiet, abandoned tunnel.  How long had it been since human feet had left their mark on this pavement?  The darkness continued on and I passed through an eternity, lost to the world outside.

The end of the top: the eastern mouth of the Yakou Tunnel.

When the end came it blinded me a little at first.  And as the world outside was revealed I saw... piles of rubble.  But no road!  I froze and looked about me.  Behind me, the mountain-side above the tunnel mouth was naked, stripped of its greenery but wearing a mist into which it receded out of sight.  The scene was post-apocalyptic, nothing but rocks, rubble, boulders, and dirt, all cast in a grey light.  As I moved forward I saw a cleft between two walls of rubble and there I found my road.  I was hugely relieved to know that it too had not been swept away in some landslide.

Downhill now.  It didn’t take long for me to see that that the SCIH on this side of the mountain was generally in better condition than on the other side.  I saw my first human being for the day, a man in a hard hat moving large pipes about a broken section of the road way.  Suddenly I knew that I would be okay.  I let myself go a little and sped down the mountain-side faster than I should have.  It was cold but I didn’t want to stop.  The road went on and on and I was braking a lot.  Sometimes I saw the rents in the roadway with only enough time left to skid to a halt on their edge or even over the edge onto the gravel and dirt.

I enter the East Rift Valley National Scenic Area.  It says so on the big marble thing behind me.

It was at either Lidao or Liyuan that I came upon my first opportunity to buy food or water.  Across the road from expansive fields of tea there was a roof covering some large tables; the kind of place that people go to eat and drink mainly for the sake of eating and drinking after a hard day’s work; definitely not fine dining.  I looked in the refrigerator longing for something hot, trying not to shiver.  A woman was preparing some green leafy vegetables in the corner.  I turned to her as I gathered a question together but she beat me to it.  She asked me (in Chinese), “Do you want something hot?”.  I left her with no doubt that I did and agreed on a bowl of hot soup.  She warmed up some Winter Melon Soup and I have to say that that bowl of hot Winter Melon Soup was the best soup I can remember having in Taiwan.  I was blissfully happy.

The SCIH goes through a couple of tunnels in the Wulu Gorge area.

It was still quite cold but very slowly warming up as I descended the mountain.  As I passed through Wulu I saw someone cooking something and stopped to order some Chao Fan (fried rice) which I thoroughly enjoyed.  Before leaving I purchased some milk-tea and cookies for the road.  The road was busier now and punctuated with construction projects, teams of men and women in hard hats busily sculpting the landscape.  I passed through Wulu Gorge and wished I had more time to stop and enjoy it.  Place names came and went - Chulai, Haiduan, Guanshan (where I bought some fruit), and onwards to Taidong.  By this time I had abandoned my plans to travel north and then westwards over the Central Cross-Island Highway.  I had done enough for now.

Back on a flat landscape again.

At about ten kilometers before Taidong I suffered a flat tire.  Upon inspecting my tires I was a little shocked to realise how badly scraped up and damaged they were.  I attempted to fit a new inner tube myself but had problems getting my air pump to work.  It occurred to me then that I had come close to disaster in the mountains: if my tire had blown on top of the mountain without a working air pump and without anyone around to help me, it could have been a very long and hungry walk to the nearest human beings.  I asked a man in some kind of mechanical workshop if he could help me but he didn’t seem to recognise or understand the high-pressure valve on my tube.  I walked my bicycle down the road until I saw a police station where I borrowed a pump and inflated my tire.  Something wasn’t quite right and after a few kilometers, at the edge of Taidong, my tire popped with a hiss and I limped the rest of the way into town, dragging my forlorn bike along beside me.

Hotel, hot shower, tuna-sub-sandwich for dinner, laundry in the bathroom sink, and finally, the ultimate in post-trauma therapy, a comfortable warm bed.

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 I have mapped my entire route on the Bikemap website.  I've included some photos and comments along the route.  Go to www.bikemap.net/route/471071

Taiwan's Southern Cross-Island Highway: Days 4 and 5 - Taidong to Tainan

Breakfast in Taidong.

Days four and five were spent cycling from Taidong to Danlu and then from Danlu back to Tainan. I took the South-Link Highway back across the island. After the drama of crossing the central mountain ranges of Taiwan, my return journey makes for a rather anticlimactic tale. I woke up, packed up and prepared myself as usual, breakfasted in a small breakfast shop downstairs, and headed off along the main highway out of Taidong.

The start of lesser road number 199 is a good landmark on the South-Link Highway.

Things only really got interesting when I stopped in the aboriginal township of Danlu for the night. If travelling westwards across the South-Link Highway, Danlu can be found about two-thirds of the way to the western coast.

I asked my way to the township's elementary school and then set about finding someone to ask for permission to pitch my tent for the night. I found the music teacher in the middle of some kind of special class and she took time out from eating cake to talk to me. She was extremely welcoming (no surprise in Taiwan) and tried to dissuade me from camping on the school grass and make use of the school hallway instead. But I was resolute and, despite the palpable threat of rain, I set my tent up on the grass to the amusement of a group of local children. Everybody, including a random elderly lady walking down the street by the school, had some kind of snake-related warning for me. The school oval ran right into the side of the jungled hills and so I had no doubt about the prospect of snakes joining me during the night. There was also something about the way that they told me about the snakes, a kind of flat by-the-way-ness, that left me in no doubt that they sometimes had snakes come down to the school.

Camping on the school grounds of Danlu Elementary School.

While setting up for the night, I made friends with the local kids and when I asked them where I could find a restaurant they told me to follow them. We walked up the street a couple of blocks from the school and then turned left and stopped at a very nondescript building. It didn't show any signs of being the kind of place where dinner could be gotten but when I stepped inside my perceptions changed. Half of the small room was occupied by a cluttered kitchen while the other half contained a few tables and chairs. Various aboriginal knick-knacks decorated the walls. To my great relief and delight there was a menu hung up on the wall above the kitchen space, confirming that this was indeed a restaurant. A middle-aged woman was busying herself in the kitchen and I bothered her to ask about dinner. It turned out that she was closing up for the day so that she could make an appearance at the local church. With the help of the kids translating for me, we established that she would be happy to make up some kind of noodle dinner for me before closing. That sounded wonderful and so, after a short wait, I was presented with a plastic container full of noodles with meat and vegetables; a hearty meal at the end of a long day. The kids took me to what must have been their parent's or relative's shop and sat me down outside it so that I could eat my dinner. I was getting along quite well with them and my Chinese was really getting a workout. The two boys went away and returned suddenly with their Nintendo Gameboys and kept me company with their beeping, shooting, racing, and exploding. I kept up a conversation with a young girl of about seven years, doing my best to keep up my end of the conversation through a mouthful of noodles. She wasn't a great conversationalist and everything suddenly began to wear on me. The kids had to go home and I was left to finish my dinner and then return to my own home, temporary though it was. I read for a while before going to sleep, infused with a sense of satisfaction from adventures had and challenges overcome. It had been a good day.

I found this monster bug in the school bathrooms.  It was about eight centimeters long from the end of its tail to its mandibles.

The new light of the following day threw the zeitgeist of the previous evening into a skew. Things became very ordinary and a little disappointing. I packed up and started on my way to the restaurant I had been to for dinner. I hadn't gotten very far when I was caught by a woman from the shop I had eaten outside the night before and encouraged in for a drink. I shared a drink with a middle-aged woman and her aunt.  From what I could gather through a haze of half-understood Chinese, the aunt seemed to be keen on having children with me and attempted to charm me with her vision of how beautiful they would look with our combined features. I wasn't really in the mood for fostering an illegitimate love-child in a small aboriginal village in Taiwan and as things got progressively more awkward I made my excuses and left to find breakfast.

While at the restaurant on the previous night I had learned that she would be open again for breakfast and I intended to return in the morning to patronise her fine establishment. I also wanted to spend some money, having received my dinner for free. But things were different in the morning. She was busy and preoccupied with several other people who seemed to be sitting around more because they wanted to socialise and less because they needed to eat. I felt like a chore. I had some toast and some ice-tea, paid up, thanked her, and departed to the bemusement of the other patrons.

Upon leaving Danlu, I decided that it was a great place to visit but that I probably wouldn't want to live there.

On the west coast I headed inland and along the foothills up the 185.

In the middle of nowhere I came upon a gambling machine and video game graveyard.

Sega Rally was big in 1995.  I remember seeing it in the arcades.  Now it sits forlorn in the wilderness, slowly decomposing, like so many other memories from my childhood.

We may be impressed with a lot of what modern technology makes possible but when everything is finished it will all be swallowed up again by the forests.

The rest of my journey home was straightforward; a series of highways and roads that took me up along the foothills and then westwards back to Tainan. I suffered from a badly-worn tire and another puncture which slowed my progress considerably. Andrea rode her bicycle out to meet me and we rode the last leg home together.

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In hindsight I have come to see my journey over the mountains as something more significant than a simple bicycle tour. For me it was a personal challenge in which my supports were removed and then, at the end, I was forced to make a leap of faith into darkness and uncertainty without being able to see where I was going. Mountains come very naturally as a metaphor for challenges, be they personal, logistical, financial, spiritual, or otherwise. I will finish this post with an excerpt from an email I wrote to a friend not long after I finished this journey across the Southern Cross-Island Highway:

 I have realised in hindsight that it all felt like a big metaphor.  Andrea was there to support me at the start but the real work (climbing the mountain) was something I had to do by myself. There's just something about mountains and getting to the top.  It's such a common metaphor for any kind of big challenge.  You know, I guess it was like Heart of Darkness, wherein the journey took me further and further into the wilderness and away from humanity and civilization; the road was closed and after a while I didn't even see any construction workers.  It was just me and the broken road.  And I got focused on getting to the Yakou Tunnel at the top.  I knew that I just had to get up there and through the tunnel and then I would be okay because it was all downhill from there on.  The road got pretty bad.  At one point I had to take the rack off my bike and carry it across a recent landslide and then come back and carry my bike as well (too many big rocks).  I saw monkeys up there.  And it's funny how circumstances conspired to take away so much.  Although the road exists on maps, maps tell me nothing about the state or condition of the road and different people told me different things about it.  Some said it was open and some said it was closed so I was really heading into uncertainty.  And (partially) because of that I had to put my tent up in a bathroom near the top on the mountain when the clouds descended and visibility was severely reduced as night closed in and I hadn't brought any more food so I missed out on dinner and breakfast.  So it was funny the way that so many important things were stripped away from me so that if I was going to get over the mountains it was going to be with minimal support - no companions, no food, no way of knowing whether I would be able to go all the way over, no idea what lay ahead, no fresh water, no electricity, no phone reception.  And when I did finally make it to the Yakou Tunnel I was faced with one last challenge before being free of my predicament - the tunnel was unlit and pitch black and I realised that it was not being used because the road was closed and even the construction workers had no reason to go there.  I couldn't go back and so, like all good adventures, getting through to the other side required a leap of faith into the darkness without being able to see the other end.  I had a light on my bike and a head light but they didn't help much and there were all sorts of strange sounds being made by water inside the tunnel.  Of course, I did make it through and from then on the rest of the journey was just logistical, getting back to Tainan via the South-Link Highway down by Kending.  In hindsight I had been drawn to do what I did and I'm glad I did it.  It was just something I felt I had to do and it all has a strange sense of something intangible and special about it.

POST SCRIPT:  At the time of completing this series of posts the Southern Cross-Island Highway appears to be closed indefinitely although I have seen something on the net about it possibly re-opening next year.

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 I have mapped my entire route on the Bikemap website.  I've included some photos and comments along the route.  Go to www.bikemap.net/route/471071

Cycling around Taiwan: Prologue

Taiwan is an island. So is Australia. One day I'd like to ride all the way around Australia but right now I don't have the essential luxuries I need to attempt that. However, Taiwan is much smaller and cycling all the way around it is much cheaper and won't take six months. In fact, depending on how fast you are able to cycle (which in turn depends on things like your physical condition, the weather, what kind of bicycle you have and how much gear you need to take with you) you could cycle around Taiwan in as few as four days. You might be able to do it in fewer days but I don't know what the record is. However, most average people attempting this feat will probably take around 7-14 days.


It would be a terrible shame for someone who loves riding their bicycle (i.e., me) to have lived in Taiwan and not spent a long week just traveling around the country only as fast as their two legs carried them on two wheels. The island really does offer a diverse landscape of different terrains, climates, local specialty foods, cultures, and random encounters with its inhabitants. My desire became a reality in February and March of this year when I cycled with my two friends, John and Andrea, around the country. Our big break came with the Chinese New Year vacation of 2010. We were all freed from our employment obligations for two weeks; Good time in which to make the most of brakes, chains, gear levers, handlebars, pedals, spokes, tires, and saddles. We started out from our home base in the city of Tainan on the south-western coast on the 9th of February and started cycling anti-clockwise around the island. Unfortunately a series of three cold fronts was on the way and it was only a matter of time before their paths crossed with ours. After three days of wind and rain we were forced to abort our peregrination in Hsinchu, within one or two days of Tainan. We were despondent.


Almost one month later we were in Hsinchu again, setting off to complete our circumnavigation of Taiwan. We rode all through the night and into the morning until once again we were standing outside our apartment building having our photo taken by one of the security guards: A 'finished' photo to mate with our 'before' photo. The photo showed the three of us looking more or less the same as we had over five weeks earlier. What it failed to capture was how we had been enriched by our experiences: the people we had met, the time we friends had spent together, and all the beauty of this remarkable place that we had been steeped in.


This series of thirteen posts and the accompanying map at Bikemap.com describe our journey. We hope that it may inspire other ordinary people wanting to experience something extraordinary.

My friends on this journey:

The beautiful and very capable Andrea.

The dashing and charismatic John.

Me. That was a stupid idea.

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Links

• John has also blogged this trip although he has included edited video sequences on his page here.
• I have retraced our route and left remarks and photos on the Bikemap website here.
• I have written up some useful advice for anybody touring around Taiwan by bicycle. You can find that information on my page about cycling in Taiwan.

On the eve of the first day of the big ride, I do some last-minute packing in our living area.

Cycling down the east coast: Pt3

Saturday morning began with light, dazzlingly bright and impossible to ignore. In erecting our tent the previous evening I had managed to orient it so that the first rays of the morning sun to strike from over the sea would pass straight through the flaps on one side of the tent and into my face, slowly charring my retinas.

I think I feel the joy of being alive! Oh, I'm mistaken: it's a stick I can feel, underneath the floor of the tent. I guess it's easy to confuse existential joy with a stick if you've just been prematurely woken by the sun, painfully searing your retinas.

The usual routine followed with minor variations allowing for character and circumstance: pack up and stow tent and other equipment, shower, eat breakfast, pack up bicycle and perform minor maintenance. I think we all pumped our tyres up.

Down the road a while we detoured a very short way to the beach. Here we danced our cares away, worries for another day, let the music play, down at Chung-yun beach. Actually I made that name up. However, we did have a long-jump contest and take some jumping photos. My mp3 player was saved from being immersed in the salty water of a freak wave by John who acted fast and plucked most of our few belongings from the sand which was soaked a second later. My sandals got a rinse in the brine but they probably needed it: long-distance cycling can really enhance your personal odors and and do terrible things to your sex-appeal.



One of the best things about Taiwan is the fruit. We reached Taitung in the afternoon and found ourselves a hotel. That night we watched the new Star Trek movie (surprisingly good) and ate a Sushi Express dinner. And of course we paid a brief visit to the local night market to pick up a few supplies for breakfast and the train journey home.

[technical note: we dropped our bicycles off at the local Giant store on Sunday morning and they were somehow shipped to the Giant bicycle store of our choice by Tuesday of the following week. We paid a fee for the service but it was not expensive and freed us of the terrible inconvenience of transporting our bicycles on the train again.]

This last shot was taken by John while waiting for our train back to Tainan. We purchased our tickets and sat down on the expansive green lawn in front of the facility. I had started the trip unnecessarily grumpy and obstinate and had slowly come around to something like revelation in the sense of reveling in the simple pleasures offered us by our temporary circumstances, like being out in the fresh air and sunshine. Inevitably and predictably the return to work was upon us faster than we would have liked and before long we were all in a taxi heading back to An-ping, bereaved at the loss of the sea, the mountains, the fresh air, and new sights. A predictable return to predictability.