Taiwan Part 4 — FRIDAY, Taidong and The Day the Plan Crumbles into Another Plan
You know you gotta get down on Friday.
So, after our exquisite stay at The Silks, we get a personal cab, provided again by our generous hotel hosts, to drive us about an hour to 1.5 hours to Hualien for 1000NT (30 bucks for a 1+ hour trip — seriously, way cheaper than NA).
While we waited for the train to arrive, we got some snacks and drinks at a 7-11. Now, I should inform you that 7-11 is probably the equivalent to Northwest Pacific’s Starbucks, or New York McDonalds, or Eastern Canada Tim Hortons. They are fracking everywhere in Taiwan. This is a side note from the trip, but during the trip we went one block and walked by two 7-11s. Weird, right?
Evan and Megan told us about a drinking game concocted in Taiwan involving 7-11s. Basically, you have to drink a beer while walking before you walk into another 7-11. If you walk into another 7-11, you have to have another beer. Apparently in some areas it is impossible to stop drinking because 7-11 is just that prevalent in the area.
Oh, and you may be wondering “You can drink alcohol publicly in Taiwan?”. Yep, you can! The only place you cannot have food or drink is on the MRT itself. Anywhere else is A-OK. We took liberty of this on occasion.
Anyway, we got a couple of 40 NT refrigerated lattes and coffees (which is about a buck) and 30NT buns from 7-11. The selection at these 7-11s is actually highly desirable; 7-11s aren’t full of junk food in Taiwan, and they actually have decent hot dogs there.
Eventually, we get on the train and meet up with Evan, Megan, Jenny, and Dylan. I already mentioned the latter two, but I’ll give a bit more detail. Jenny is actually Taiwanese, born from Taipei, and works as a councilor at Megan’s school. She lived in New Zealand for 15 years, and just came back to live in Taipei. She was truly my savior at one point during the trip, but I’ll get to that when we get there. Very funny gal and had really good English and Mandarin, so she became our official speaker of the group, a role she took very gracefully and for which we offer her many, many thanks.
Dylan, her boyfriend, also works at Megan’s school as an IT teacher. He’s originally from New Zealand, and therefore I had fun listening to his accent and hearing him say “Eh?” and making comparisons to my own “Eh?”. They are apparently different. Nice chap, and was really hoping that we’d go snorkeling. That didn’t happen sadly, but basically he’s an avid water dude.
Anyway, they were also both very fun people to be around and I’d love to see them again. Dylan said if I ever go to New Zealand to ring him up. I’ll take that offer at some point :)
With that brief introduction done, we train it up to Taidong. Again, nice views along the way. We get to Taidong, get a cab (hooray for cabs) and have a really nice, talkative cab driver humor Evan, Jeff and I. He offers his business card — score!
We get to the ferry terminal and, lo and behold, no ferries are going to Orchid Island. Whoops! Their site was uninformative, since we did not know about this until we arrived. Gulp. Well, we concoct a new plan based on this information + Megan and Dylan requiring being back in Taipei for Tuesday class:
- Stay in Taidong for Friday
- Get up for the 8 am ferry to Orchid Island on Saturday, stay there one night
- Take a ferry from Orchid Island to Green Island at 4 pm on Saturday, stay there one night
- Take an 11 am ferry from Green Island back to Taidong, take a train to Kiaoshung, hang out with Morgan for the evening, then high speed train it back to Taipei (which, going from south to north of the Island takes an hour and a half), thus technically travelling the whole of mainland Taiwan
Waaaay moooore complicated, but we all agree.
So, Taidong. We actually didn’t go to downtown Taidong. We stayed near the ferry, and enjoyed the local food (we got to see pig ear up close and personal, which looked a little odd but still looked tasty by my books) and find a place to stay. We found a nice place surrounded by roosters, much to Dylan’s chagrin. Nice lady.
The day was mostly spent eating and loitering about like ruffians. We went to the gate of a military base from which we heard planes taking off a lot, we ran into more angry stray dogs, found some coconuts and destroyed them along with their ant ecosystems, and then ate again. Went to a Thai place owned by a really nice Chinese / Thai woman. We were her only customers, so we got to talk to her a bunch which was cool. Good food too! Remarkably tastier than most of the Thai places I’ve been in Seattle.
The six of us had some Taiwan brewskis and chatted a bunch. Then we headed back to the hostel and got some shut-eye.
Were you expecting a long post? Well, too bad.
