Hualien

At 7:00am on New Year's day, after three hours of sleep, we left for the Taipei train station to go to Hualien. Everything went well, we arrived early for our 8:15am train. We boarded the train, took our seats, and the train left the station. While we were sitting a man came up to us, showed us his ticket and said we were in his seat, we showed him our tickets as they both said the same seat number. He left and we felt bad for him. He returned with the ticket man from the train...apparently we were the unlucky ones, we boarded the wrong train. I wondered why we boarded an 8:00am train when the ticket said 8:15am, this explains the conflict. This is a picture before we found out we were on the wrong train. The guy standing in back is the guy whose seat I am sitting in.

This was a major problem because every train was sold out this weekend going to Haulien. We got off at the first stop and took a taxi back to the original station but we missed our "real" train. We ended up getting on a 9:30am train and stood in the middle aisle for two hours and finally got to sit in a seat the last hour of the three hour train ride. Not the best way to start the trip.

We arrived at the train station in Hualien and were picked up by a driver from the hotel we were staying at. Our friend Ping is originally from the east coast so he hooked us up with a very nice and friendly hotel. We dropped off our bags and went out to downtown Hualien for lunch and a little shopping. We played some games at a fake gambling video game store and I even bought a DVD of my favorite show in Taiwan from the MOMO children's television channel. We went back to the hotel and then basically passed out for the night. The next day was an all day tour of Taroko National Park, the biggest attraction in the area.

Taroko National Park was beautiful, it reminded me a lot of the mountain areas of Colorado and Northern California. Many beautiful mountains, rivers and cliffs.

The road driving through the park is very narrow and quite scary on a large tour bus. The road took four years to build and 450 men died in the process. There were mountains, a river, rocks, gorges and marble was everywhere. I can see how this is the largest marble gorge in the world, it is literally everywhere you look.

Later that night after returning from Taroko National Park, we went out to the Hualien Night Market. There was food everywhere and many games to play. You could toss rings and win a giant Sponge Bob doll or even baby piglets.

Charlene got down to serious business and won some more dolls from the "crane game".

Before we went home from the night market we went to the back area on the beach. Everyone was lighting fireworks. We bought a "red lantern", wrote our good wishes for 2009, lit the lantern and sent it on its way.

The next day our train left at 5:00pm so we had a few hours to kill. We checked out of our hotel and took a trip to a Liyu Lake. We ate some local food and had just enough money to take a one hour paddle boat ride.

We got off the boat, walked around the the lake a little and got into a taxi to go back to the hotel and then the train station. We stopped by the hotel, grabbed our bags, said our thanks and goodbye and off we went to the Hualien train station. Charlene triple checked that we had the right tickets and the right train for the ride back. These are the right tickets and the right train:

This time we were able to sit in seats for the entire three hour train ride. We had to deal with around 15 screaming children in our train car, but that's the price you pay for public transportation and bad parenting. Either way Haulien was a beautiful place and we were very, very lucky to visit it with such great weather. It stopped raining a few hours before New Year's Eve at Taipei 101 and started raining about 2 hours after we got back from our trip to Haulien.

That's a pretty good start to 2009.

Jim