Ok, I got the wrong batch of pictures. I looked at the first one and remembered the trip south. Except for the first three, they are actually of Taroko Park after a significant typhoon. We were trying to make it to the middle of the island (HeHuan Mountain) but had to turn around because of poor road conditions. The pics below are actually the good road conditions...they got worse.
This is me climbing a Betel Nut Palm; almost....at.....the......top.....
Blury picture of us eating night market food. Mmmmm....night markets (spoken while drooling in a Homer-esque voice)
This was actually on the way home. We stopped at a National Reserve and hiked in to where the people dont often go because it is too dangerous (read: not along the path or on the guided tour). This swimming place was absolutely beautiful, and the bridge above shows the height of the gorge.
Me trying to get through a flooded tunnel on my scooter. I was weighing the options - do I go fast and burst through the deep parts or do I go slow and wallow with stability through the deep parts. I think fast won. I got wet, that is all I remember.
A muddy road that is not a treat to drive on with a scooter. There was a landslide to the left and it covered the whole road, which was excavated irregularly by people, allowing traffic to resume passing. Traffic, meaning one vehicle an hour or so.
A view from one of the passes - you can see the road already travelled in teh distance as a white line horizontal to the picture (to the left). The mountains are blanketed by lush sub-tropical forests and somewhere out there is the notorious Taiwan Bear. We heard it once, but never saw it. It is there....somewhere.
Another view of the road travelling throught the mountains. This is actually past Taroko and on our way to HeHuan before having to turn around. Most of the roads are single lanes, but people drive cautiously most of the time and danger only exists from landslides...well....ok people drive erratically. It is not all that safe, but at the same time not all that dangerous. You just have to be quick with reactions. Beautiful, though.
Typhoon damage - This was what was left of the road in the fall of 2005. By the summer of 2006 it was just finished being fixed. It was quite a marvel to be driving along and come across this. We actually met this sight the first time in a very uncomfortable way: we were driving ot Taroko late at night after Crystal was done work. It was raining and completely dark- we are in the middle od the mountains, where there are no villages and no lights, no electricity and no anything except road and river valley. We were driving around, fast to try to get to the upstream village within the next hour or so, and saw this weird looking "somewthing" on the road. Instinctively I thought it was just a boulder that had fallen during the rainstorm so I kept going and was about to swerve around it when I realized....hastily.....that it was a pilon and not a rock. Then I realized why a pilon might be there...illuminated only by my headlights shining through a downpour. So I quickly changed plans and squeezed the brake as hard as I could without losng control.....which worked but left us metres away from this horrifying sight. It was completely dark, so it took us a while to visualize the whole thing, but after we did our hearts began to sink. It was that close....
It was not until the drive home a few days later that we saw the whole thing in daylight and realized with great certainty that we almost went over that ledge at full speed. Nobody would have found us until the next morning. It would have been too late.
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