Formosan Macaque that was none to pleased to see us so close to it....it made a loud and vocal exit soon after this picture!
We are winding down things around here...Crystal is already done her classes and I have one more week to go. It is a long overdue break that is approaching, and while we have a lot to do before we hit Borneo soil, our minds are, um, already on vacation (sometimes!).
Friday was a delightful school dinner to celebrate the end of the semester and the Chinese New Year vacation that approaches; dancing, rather excellent food, prizes (we took home 500NT ($30 CDN) in gift certificates for a bread/cake shop...) and overall a nice goodbye atmosphere. Perhaps 100+ people, including teachers, staff, admin, volunteers, local officials, etc all sat down to a goodbye dinner and evening. Afterwards we met other foreigners - a rare occasion for us here - at a pub and chatted about the random things that inhabit conversations at pubs. Life, travel, life, stuff, and..life.
Saturday we - finally - went to Taitung and rented folding bikes. We had wanted to try them out for so long and finally got the chance. After a day and a half of riding through the mountains, along the coast, through the forest....they totally officially rock! If I had the money I would buy one today. But, lacking said funds, I am happy that we found a nice cheap place to rent them in Taitung (about 2 hours train south) and found some really cool places to poke around in the backwoods and coastal areas of the city.
We also came upon a surreal camping area....totally going back there! Nothing of dramatic mention, just a good couple of days on rented bikes checking out a totally new part of this island. Every weekend....something new to see. Crazy.
The view from the mountain road.
Scenery along our bike through the mountains; a palmy day for a ride (get it...palm tree...palmy......)
"The Taitung Melange" is a geological formation that is, at least as of 2003 and from what I can gather on online journal searches, a rather curious unknown artifact of the past 50 or so million years. It arranges itself between two main mountain belts - the Coastal (~60mya) and the Central (~600 mya) ranges. It is a consolidated/weak massive structure that is both highly impermeable and prone to rill wash turn gullying - it kinda looks like a mini mountain range. The whole river bed in this area has high walls of rilled and gullied walls, sometimes sheer, and then there is the inland section that looks like a foreign pinnacled karst formation. Karst it totally is not, but from a distance, perhaps is seems so. Anyway, its a cool oddity and this was our first chance to see it, touch it, wonder about it.....and sent me on a day long perusal of internet resources trying to figure out how/when it formed. Still work to be done...
At night we found a weekend hotspot; live music of all genres and serviced with a pub and....wonderfully....a fire pit outside. It was so freaking cold....were it not for the fire we may not have made it through the whole show. Bought the CD.....something about a Chinese old white chicken. Homework...homework....
Air force in full practice mode; it was an endless parade of (we presume) take off/landing practice. Cool to see as we wandered along the coast and spied our new camping spot for future jaunts to Taitung.
Of note today (Monday) is that we had snow in the mountains last night. On the way to work I bike directly towards the mountains for the first few minutes and I always occupy myself by searching for new landslides, features and just generally enjoying the view while I pedal. Today, the view was white. Snow! I have never, I don't think at least, seen snow in Taiwan at such a low elevation. In the mountains (alpine) it snows every year and even some of the lower places on extremely cold days. But, to see snow at something like 600masl was a dramatic and totally unexpected morning sight. So weird...so weird.
