Driving across the central mountain range - December 3, 2006

Rebecca and I decided to take a litle Sunday drive last Sunday - visiting old stomping grounds, checking out future weekend getaways and in general enjoying a nice little day trip away from Yangmei. Very good idea - the weather a little wet and foggy, however not too bad, actually the best possible weather when driving around on a Sunday on Taiwan, as it keeps the hordes of locals at home, thus leading to less congestion on the mountain roads.

Well, my not too trusty Toyota Corolla went "poof" for good a bit more than one week ago, leving me with a rather acute transportation problem. The initial solution was to borrow Rebecca's mothers Yulon Sentra. It looks line something you would buy if your economy did not afford the relative luxury of a bus ticket, however it's in good shape and it did very well indeed.

Rebecca mother's car.

The plan was to drive up from Neiwan in Xinzhu county, visit the Yulao pass, drive on to my favorite camping ground, and then cross over on the almost rebuilt connection road to the North Cross Island Highway. We would then take the highway to Yilan, and double back through the newbuilt Jiang Weishui freeway to Taipei and on back to Yangmei. Simple plan - taking advantage of the flock mentality quite a few locals have when it comes to Sunday drives - everybody go to the same tired old spots and up the same roads, and if you drive on different ones, you might be lucky and avoid the crowds. As it turned out, we were very lucky, right till we hit the freeway, that is.

We set off fairly early - leaving Yangmei at 8:30 - passing through Neiwan before 9 AM meaning that we managed to avoid the crowds usually descending on the Neiwan area on weekends. We had a fairly fast drive up to the Yulao pass (altitude 1421 meters over sea level) - the road was in good shape, the car did well, and the traffic was very light. The Yulao pass is one of my favorite spots in Taiwan. If you look to the west, you can see the flatlands toward Xinzhu and the Taiwan strait, if you look toward the east, you get a great vista over a rather large part of the mountain range.

Showing here:

View toward the west - mountains, flatlands and the sea

View toward Taigang, home of a very nice homestay - it closed 3 years ago - sorely missed. Still a great location for a village.

View toward Milgaw - also called Maliguang in Chinese. My favorite camping spot is down there. The building in the middle of the picture is a school - right behind it is a great trail taking you up to some waterfalls and swimming holes. Great place indeed, I go there at least 5 times per year.

Most locals up in this part of the mountains are Polynesians - their tribe is called Atayal. They mainly live as farmers, day laborers, and off government handouts. The picture above is of a women selling sweet potatoes and cabbage. she's well bundled up - it was not that cold, actually.

Another woman there runs a cafe - Great views of the valley from the window tables. She's selling knives, vinegar, millet wine and honey on the side. I suggested her to install a stove in her cafe - in the winter it can snow up there. She was not too convinced.

We continued toward the north cross island highway - on the way I fell over some recently felled bamboo awaiting transportation down to the flatlands. The bamboo up there is of an excellent quality and a fair bit is exported to Japan. The growing and harvesting of bamboo is a welcome earner for hte locals. Unfortunately bamboo has rather shallow roots, so the increased growing of it has led to some enviromental degradation - in the wake of typhoons landslides are common below the bamboo patches.

A result of this can be seen in the picture to the right - beautiful dam - it looks nice, has a little waterfall, however the reservoir is completely filled up with gravel. Sad. OK a typhoon will take it out one day, and another one will be built.

The road toward the North Cross Island Highway was in fairly good shape. We only encountered a few narrow dirt patches, so we made good progress and reached Baling - the mid point of the highway and where we linked up with it - around noon. Time for lunch - pretty horrible as we choose a restaurant with Chinese fare. When in the mountains, I want to eat their salted spicy pork, bamboo rice, mountain pidgeon, and river shrimp - not fatty cold chicken served with stir-fried cabbage. Well, it was filling, and after finishing the meal, we set off toward the east and Yilan. Baling is the last major settlement before the Lanyang river valley is reached - it was not crowded, and the road toward the east coast was more or less deserted. As usually I had topped the tank off before leaving the flatlands, there are no tanks up on that strech, only 1 hotel and a mountain ranger station, and if you run out of fuel, you are out of luck. Cell phone coverage is good all over the road, so getting stranded is thankfully not an option.

The road goes up from 600 meters altitude at Baling to 1200 meters at the top point. It's a great drive, pine and cedar forests, always damp and very often foggy, does not feel like the Taiwan most know. However, Taiwan is mainly mountains, so most of Taiwan actually looks this way. Nice picture to the left.

...and here's another one.

Mountains and water - at the very top of the road.

Rebecca next to the car - not car sick which is quite unusual for her. Pretty well done, as the road was both rather winding and fairly narrow as well.

On the way down toward the east coast, we managed to encounter my preferred view - the sea of clouds - or more like a box actually, clouds above and below - a bit of a drizzle, and actually rather cold.

I was somewhat tired by the time we reached the Lanyang River valley (Lanyang River is the main river leading to the Yilan plain, which is the biggest alluvial plain on the east coast and the second biggest in Taiwan after the Tainan plains). We therefore decided to stop at a mobile cafe - not a coffee cart - no a lorry with a cafe on the bed. Cool - we had to get in.

Inside it was rather cozy - 6 tables, a small bar desk, 7 tables 20 or so chairs. Lots of windows, and not too woobly. The coffee machine was a gas heated 2 group Carimali by the way. Only draw back was the diesel generator - a bit noisy. Still a great idea - wonder when they get those in Denmark.

After our coffee break, we decided to head back - it was 3PM, and I was worried about teh traffic going back toward the west coast through the Xueshan tunnel. Justifuable so, because we ended up queued up in front of the damn tunnel for 1 hour. The tunnel is a marvel, 13 km long, 4 lane freeway, and the locals drive so slow in it that the control center has taken to broadcast warnings over teh loudspeaker system: "Car with license LC 0099, you are driving too slow please speed up", or "Please remember, you won't get fined if you drive less than 10km/h over the speed limit". The issue is that the speed limit is 70 in the tunnel against 90 on most of the rest of the freeway, you can't overtake in the 13km tunnel, so if you are stuck behind a road hog, you are screwed.

We made it home around 7PM, went to bed early, tired but happy after a great day. I like driving around in the muntains, or hiking in them river-tracing in them, or camping there as well. It has been an ambition of mine to try to make it across the island and back in one day - and I finally did it. 10 hours of driving time only, less than what I tought.