jani

The next morning we repeated most of our route in reverse: bus to Chiayi, BRT to the THSR station, and then aboard the bullet train again -- this time all the way to Taipei Main Station. We'd grabbed some quick convenience store snacks for lunch when Z realized that we had a bottle of oolong tea and half a bottle of Kaoliang, the local 53-degree firewater, and the combination tasted good enough that by the time we arrived in Taiwan it was all gone and we were, as they say in Finland, slightly tilting to the starboard.

jani

After breakfast we took a rather less spectacular if twice as fast, twice as comfortable and comparatively half-priced bus back to Chiayi, passing through countless tea plantations and road construction sites.

jani

The next morning, we woke up bright and early so we could catch the reason we'd come to Chiayi in the first place, namely the Alishan Forest Railway. The name doesn't sound like much, and indeed, it was built by the Japanese for the rather un-noble purpose of stripping their island colony of its prized giant cypresses.

jani

The plane landed into a hazy dusk and rolled up to Taipei Taoyuan Airport Terminal 1, a building sufficiently old and moldy that Chiang Kai-Shek's ghost was probably happy to get his name off the thing. After a lenghty wait at immigration that caused us to just miss our bus, we chowed down on the first of many bowls of beef noodles to come (damn, this stuff is good) and hopped on the next bus to the day's first destination -- Taiwan High Speed Rail's Taoyuan station.

jani

In July-August 2007, using Wikimania 2007 as a convenient excuse, I travelled around Taiwan for the first time for 8 days. This is the miniature index of my miniature adventures.