The Road to Taroko

...was rife with problems. But worth the hassle in the end!

The morning was easy enough; we had a delicious breakfast at Roseland and easily found the bus stop our hosts recommended to us. It got there right on time, and we boarded it--but as we did, our problems began.

From time to time, my mom has heart irregularities. Today was one of those times. When it didn't stop after 25 minutes--a new record for her--we got off the bus in a little town along our route, ignoring the bus driver's warning that we weren't at Taroko yet. We found a pharmacy and I looked up how to explain what was going on, but no sooner had I made it that far than it finally, thankfully, stopped.

So we returned to where we had gotten off the bus, only to discover the next bus didn't come for another hour. Perfect.

When we did eventually get back on the bus, it was a relatively quick journey to Taroko Main Station, where we found, at last, an escape from my personal raincloud. We hiked (at my mom's insistence) towards a suspension bridge and native village, then (at my suggestion) veered off onto a steep side trail cut into the hillside, which was marked as Dali village via cable station, and promised to be shorter. It looked fine at first--but then it strayed into leaf-covered rock piles which was something akin to bouldering, not hiking, and my mind rested uncomfortably on the signs warning against venomous snakes we'd seen at the trailhead, and the many unnerving accounts I've had of the snakes in Taiwan, and we turned back before we reached the top.

Turns out, we may have been pretty close, but there's no way of knowing. And, as it started raining before we reached the bottom, I'm pretty sure we made the right choice.

(Taroko, which I've neglected to mention up until this point, is absolutely gorgeous. Everyone should go there if they have the chance.)

After lunch and some deliberations, we took another bus up to Swallow's Grotto, which was absolutely stunning and slightly dangerous, given the many, many falling rocks warnings, coupled with our lack of the safety helmets that literally everyone else was wearing. But we survived, and got some great pictures out of it.

Eventually, we caught the last bus back to Hualien, grabbed some dinner and souvenirs from a local night market, picked up our luggage from Roseland, where the owners had graciously allowed us to store it for the day, and hopped a cab for the train station.

So now we're in Taipei, at Chocolate Box Backpackers, which is a bit of a shock to my mom's system but I did ask, inform, and warn her about it well in advance of booking...

Another wonderful moment from the day: on our hike, my mom (being my mom) had picked up a discarded beetle exoskeleton and put it in her bag for safekeeping. Turns out, it wasn't so safe there. On the bus ride back, she tried to extract its tiny pieces and grabbed for a plastic bag in the seat-back in front of us and stuck her hand in it to open it--only to discover that it was actually a used motion sickness bag.

But it was her reaction that made it. Think of an old-fashioned, now apparently cheesy slasher flick. You know the moment where someone is about to be stabbed, and the filmmakers want you to be really scared, so they amp up the music to a series of three trills? Yeah. Well, my mom made that sound. With her voice, down to the three repetitions. I literally could not stop laughing long enough to explain what I found so funny about her sticking her hand in a bag of someone elses' vomit. But now you know...

So yeah, Taroko was gorgeous and difficult. And I'll be going back.

Loose ends

My brain these past few days has been a tangled mess of different countries and numbers, figures and names bouncing from point to point as I try to determine which flight to take, which hotel to book, when to send which documents, how much money to send to my bank account back home. Taiwan, Thailand, America, Japan; Hualien, Meinong, Green Island, Taipei, Chiang Mai, Bangkok, Phuket; Texas, Tennessee, Washington, Ohio, New York. Too many locations; too many numbers. They simply won't queue.

By today, at least, I have managed to bring a fair amount of them into line. Over the course of many hours, many websites, some help from Fonda, some help from my mom, an email from an adviser from my university, and a solitary trip to the bank, I am now assured of a place to stay in Hualien and Taipei; a flight to and from Thailand (internal flights are still sticky, though...); loan deferment sent; money transferred home; necessary items purchased.

And I even managed to make myself a complete meal tonight on a single burner!

One thing I will not miss about living in Taiwan is the immense hassle it is to deal with multiple financial systems, which collectively rely upon the archaic system of wiring money whenever it needs to be moved across continents and international borders. It's especially odd given how very open our world's borders seem to be to trade in general; I can only hope that businesses have better tools at their disposal than I do.

On the plus side, the bank's staff definitely recognizes me and invariably ushers me directly to the sole bank employee who speaks passable English.

This is rather a random post, and I must say that this is neither more nor less than a reflection of my current state of mind. Planning for multiple trips while planning multiple months' budgets from multiple bank accounts in multiple countries produces nothing if not a sense of scattered-ness. And with so many loose ends floating around, it's all I can do to grab at a few in passing and try to fasten them down before they strangle me.