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The Taroko Gorge is an impressive
marble gorge in the east coast mountains of Taiwan. This was one of my
favorite parts of the trip. I stayed in the little town of Tienhsiang at a
Catholic hostel for two nights before I hitchhiked to the West.
That temple there is part of the little town that I stayed in. The coolest
parts of the gorge I drove through in a taxi and so was not able to take
pictures.
When I started my first hike I spotted some large and beautiful
butterflies.
Suckling some nectar.
I hiked through that little tunnel you can see there and explored the
gorge on the other side. That is where I saw my first monkey. I then hiked
up the mountain that the tunnel goes through.
The hike up the mountain was a lot of this action.
Here is another one of those spiders. You can just sort of get a feel for
the magnitude of the web.
You can see the little town down there.
Some views from the hike.
That picture was taken from this little rest platform actually
Some more views
A special toadstool
Bamboo is scary to walk through when it is windy because the reeds all
clank together and make spooky noises.
Some nice bridges in the town. That pagoda you saw in other pictures is on
the hill on the right.
The next day I went on a long hike. This picture of the trail sort of
characterized the hike. A blasted out path high above a gorge.
During typhoons many rocks fall down. This was evident by the railings
that were blasted out quite frequently.
At the end of the trail were two farming communities only accessible by
foot or scooter. This guy passed me a few times shuttling boxes of peaches
to the road. There was one portion of the path that had a landslide over
it and he would have to carry all the boxes over it by hand and then load
them onto another scooter on the other side.
The hike featured many high and long suspension bridges. I found them very
thrilling and interesting. Notice the old one next to it.
I had a fun time dropping rocks from the bridges into the river far far
below. It scared me.
That bridge there is obviously an old one.
Another nice bridge.
You can see the first farm community on that plateau. The second one was
similar but had no nice place to take a photo of it.
Here are one of those farms.
I talked a lot about the large bugs there. Most of them I wasn't able to
take photos of, or it is hard to determine how large they are from the
photos. This photo shows well the scale of the bugs there. This is a
caterpillar. Everything from the bees to the ants to the grasshoppers were
simply on a larger scale.
After my hike I soaked myself in this fabulous hot spring. The coolest one
I have ever been to. This is the river where I grabbed that girl that was
being swept down.
A ground level view of the hot spring. You can see in this picture that
the rock here is marble.
The little room that I stayed in at the Catholic hostel. The door had a
two inch space above the floor so that bugs could march in at their
convenience. It was supposed to make me feel closer to nature or
something.
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