Breaking News, World News and Taiwan News.

Updated Thursday, January 10, 2008 0:00 am TWN, By Richard Saunders, Special to The China Post



	Looking almost like a miniature mountain range, these peaks are made of soft, quickly eroded earth. (By Richard Saunders, Special to The China Post) More Photos (2)

Sponsors
▪	Save 75% for all hotels in Shanghai, Beijing and whole China. Lowest rates for Flights in China.
▪	Get the best deals for Guangzhou Hotels or choose from more than 10,000 hotels in 499 Chinese cities.
▪	Find great real time deals on China Flights. Book flights to China or China domestic flights 24/7.
▪	Buy china wholesale products from reliable chinese wholesalers on DHgate.com!

Discount Hotel Rates

The moon worlds of Kaohsiung County

The viewpoint (and adjacent coffee shop, an ugly, two-story monstrosity of exposed metal girders) commands a magnificent panorama over a huge area of barren, eroded soil—a deeply wrinkled landscape eroded into countless mini gullies, ravines and peaks. Vegetation hangs on in places, softening the landscape a little, but this place still looks like nowhere else in Taiwan.

Enjoy the view for a few minutes, but if time is short, leave this tourist trap behind and head down into the heart of the badlands themselves. The direct way is via a narrow lane that fearlessly plunges straight down the very steep northern escarpment of the ridge. Take care if going this way, as it’s very steep. In a couple of kilometers, the road levels out temporarily. Look out here for a sign in Chinese to the “Grand Canyon” (大峽谷).

Turn right and follow the dusty lane for a couple of hundred meters until photogenic pinnacles of earth loom above the road on either side, for all the world like miniature mountain ranges. Park in the car park at the end of the road, and walk towards the metal fence in front, until the “Grand Canyon” is suddenly revealed as the ground in front drops away into a deep ravine.

The silly name does this beautiful place no favors. It’s neither a spectacular nor a massive landform, but the countless formations of the rain- and wind-carved ravine walls—impressive, exquisite, delicate, often appearing to defy gravity—make a wondrous sight. This place is especially magical come late afternoon as the sun sinks low in the sky, casting a rich orange light over the cliffs.

The Grand Canyon of Caoshan makes for some great photo ops and the developed area around Tianliao Moon World is perfect for the kids, but my own favorite area of badlands is the one we stumbled across on our scooters at the beginning of this article: a little-known one lying about midway between them.

Take route 28 from Tianliao, and about two kilometers after Moon World, turn left onto a narrow lane known as route 39-1. Motor along this quiet, winding road for a spell, and once again thick undergrowth and trees make way for those strange hillsides of crumbling earth.

The landscape here looks no more like the surface of the moon, for all I know, than the nearby Grand Canyon resembles its namesake in the U.S. but one thing is for certain: This is the closest thing we have in Taiwan to a lunar landscape.

1|2