Day 9 started early with another high speed train ride... this time without Shannon and Mike to help us navigate the rail system, but we made it!! We took the high speed rail at near 300km/h to the central region of Taiwan where we then caught a bus taking us 2 hours directly into Alishan National Scenic Area. Alishan is a mountain "resort" and natural preserve. Basically, it's a national park in the middle of the mountains with a whole bunch of hotels. The drive up on the bus was long and bumpy and winding and beautiful. There used to be a train that looped through the park, but due to landslides parts of the narrow-gauge track have been destroyed, never to be fixed again, and to there are only a few short runs the trains make. That being said, two of the short runs are connected by a series of hiking trails, and that's what we decided we would do upon arriving in Alishan.
The main train station - this is where we caught the train taking us on the first leg of the trip and where the second train brought us back to.
The train ride was squishy, slow and uncomfortable. It would have been nearly as fast to walk, but we made it to our first stop and got off with throngs of other non-english speaking tourists. There were tour group leaders with their flags and stuffed toys on sticks all over the place. You couldn't help but just be carried on with the crowed.
It was kind of funny that every time I stopped to take a picture, everyone else behind me would stop and take a picture of whatever I'd taken a picture of. It was like they didn't want to miss anything that might be a highlight... mean while I was just practicing shooting in manual.
One of the highlights are the massive red pines. I've seen red pines in California, but they were no where near as big as some of the ones we saw here.
First chance we got, we fled the crowds! We saw a trail that no one else was following and we took it. Like all trails, it was comprised largely of stairs going up. We checked our map a little ways down the trail (once all the voices were no longer audible and we felt alone in nature once again) and found we were on a trail up to one of the mountain peaks. We toyed with the idea of climbing to the peak, but since there was so much cloud we figured we wouldn't see anything anyways so we only climbed half way up the trail before returning to the well beaten path.
Some of the narrow-gauge tracks that are being repaired (two-feet sex-inches wide). Our trail up the mountain mostly followed these tracks, so we followed the tracks back instead cause there were a lot fewer stairs that way.
When we rejoined the original trail it was much emptier... likely because we were coming up on the last train back to the main Alishan station and we'd have to move pretty fast to make it there. We first saw the sister lakes (more like ponds as you can see in the picture above). Josh's comment was, "go figure, there's something naturally beautiful and they go and stick something man made in the middle to make it an attraction!"
We also past by another temple, but my favourite part of this temple was all the Japanese lanterns in the trees in the area all around. I bet it would have looked really cool at night, but we never were out there in the evening.
A pretty waterfall.
And this is the train.... a rickety old diesel engine pulling five cars. We just made it in time to catch the last train back to Alishan's main station. From there we had hot pot for dinner, made arrangements for the next day's sunrise (cause that's why people go to Alishan) and then went to bed early in preparation for a 4:00am wake up call.
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