Taiwan: Day 12

Wulai was our destination for day 12.  We took a bus from one of the MRT (similar to subway) stations and arrived in Wulai about an hour from leaving Shannon and Mike's.  We walked through the outdoor day market but felt it too early to eat so we kept going. 

 We took the "Little Train" to Wulai falls.  As you can see here, the little train really was little.  It sounded like a lawn mower and moved about as fast as a riding mower.  The maps of the area made it look like it would have been a long walk to the falls with out the Little Train, but in fact we were only on the train for maybe five minutes, and found out it was only 1.5km to the falls, so we decided to walk back instead of taking the train again.

Wulai Waterfall falls 80 meters into the river below, and although it doesn't have much flow it was still beautiful.  I only wish I'd had my tripod with me so that I could have taken longer exposure pictures and had better colour results.

 As part of our lunch we bought a bamboo steamed rice thing.  Basically, rice and water are pressed into a piece of bamboo and then it's heated.  To serve, the woman picked up her hatchet and split one end and pried it open.  The result, very sticky, slightly sweet rice that we drizzled with a sweet and spicy hot sauce, and enjoyed with beer.  Some of the other food we tried from the market for lunch wasn't quite as good.  But we did buy a bunch of mini banana which I thought were very yummy and they reminded me of being in Kenya.

 It might as well be a tradition to take a beer-ad shot while drinking the local brew.  Taiwan beer was pretty standard wherever we went in Taiwan, and was a pretty enjoyable drink.

A statue of a native man and his hunting dogs.  The plaque told us that hunting was a big deal in this area, and frequently the men would go off for days to find and capture their prey.  Sometimes the men would loose their barrings and so frequently would rely on their hunting dogs to take them back to their homes.  

 Another shot of the falls, this time looking down river towards the hot springs area.  Wulai is "famous" (reminder, famous reads as popular) for it's hotsprings, only unlike in Beitou where there is a hot spring coming to the surface, in Wulai, it is the earth that heats the water.  The river itself is not hot, but peole use rocks along to shore to catch the water and then stir up the sand and release the heat into the water to create little hot tubs.  We spent an hour or so trying to create our own little hot tub (and it was surprising how much heat was coming off the rocks and sand) until a local man showed us the real trick of draining a pool higher up on the shore (from when the water levels were higher due to the hydro dam up stream) that is too hot to sit in into a lower pool like we had built.  At least that's what we think he was telling us... he didn't have a word of English.

A shot of the town of Wulai