Venturing up Chiayi's Alishan

Yes, I did buy a pair of paper sunglasses for NT$10, but I decided that they would not actually protect my eyes. An old lady beside us said that at this point, the landscape would turn gold with the sun’s rays bathing them – but it didn’t happen.

After getting back to our hotel at around 7:30 a.m., I was exhausted and immediately drifted off to sleep. At about 9:00 a.m., two of my friends were getting ready to go hiking, and I didn’t go because not only was I dead tired, but also because I erroneously thought there would be time later to go hiking. At nearly noon, my wife woke me up to say that we must get out of the hotel room and get ready to go by minivan to Fenci Hu (奮起湖), where we would sample the so-called famous lunch boxes and walk through Alishan’s tourist street. I had missed my chance to go hiking in the ancient woods.

When we got to Fenci Hu, we were immediately led to the lunch box establishment. As it happened, our lunch boxes tasted exactly the same as any other random lunch box and the atmosphere of the “restaurant” was “horse-horse, tiger-tiger.” The only thing left to do now was to walk up and down the tourist street. I couldn’t help but draw a comparison between Fenci Hu’s streets and the streets of Jioufen (九份). The only really interesting things in that village were two steam locomotives built around 1915 by the Japanese, being displayed at the train station.

Our last stop as we headed down the mountain, back to Chiayi in the minivan, was a pair of suspension footbridges by the name of Tianchang (天長) and Dijiou (地久). Tianchang was quite nice as it was really high up and the view of the gorge beneath it was exciting, but Dijiou was merely a low bridge over a small river. After a relatively short ride in the minivan, we were back in Chiayi in time for dinner.

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