Alright! It's Wednesday, 16 January! The Chungli/National Central University part of the meeting is over, and it's off to the mountains via High Speed Rail! When you are inside the cars you won't think you are in a 21st-century conveyance, but after you traverse the island from top to bottom in under 3 hours, you'll know. It's Fast.
We only went halfway down the island, but it certainly felt a little more tropical when we arrived:
Of course, we then immediately started to climb (in a bus). After we had climbed a lot, we were in the tea-growing region. Amazingly, I don't have a single photo of a tea farm, but we were inside a bus the whole time, on a very curvy road-- you know, the kind they put up mirrors in the curves:
When we stopped again, we were above the tea-growing areas, heading into the seriously scenic part of our trip. Scenic like this:
Walking up a little trail outside Fencihu, we noticed an interesting piece of infrastructure: a "wooden horse" track:
Now, I feel like this just has to be a play on "iron horse", but since there are three languages in play in that trope, it's somewhere between unlikely and unknowable. Basically, this was a track laid down to facilitate the movement of sledges carrying goods up and down the mountain. Much labor-saving, and no complicated wheel-making!
Anyway, now that we've stopped in Fencihu, it's time to catch (again) the train. Here it comes, the Alishan Forest Railway!
No comments:
Post a Comment