Hualien and the Taroko Gorge

Taiwan is sometimes been called Formosa, which means "beautiful island" in Portuguese. I'd been to Taiwan a half dozen times before this trip, and I must admit that I never thought it was beautiful. Full of fun sights, shops and food? Definitely. But "beautiful" was a word that I reserved for places like Yosemite or the Grand Canyon, not a busy and often chaotic city.

Of course, I had never been to Hualien or the Taroko Gorge before. Unfortunately, my crummy pictures won't do it justice, because it's a gorge, and you have to be standing in it to get the full experience. But here's an example of what you'd see looking up versus looking down (imagine that the following two pictures are a slightly-mismatched vertical panorama):

Here's another attempt to show the height and narrowness of the gorge (I think this is at the Tunnel of Nine Turns):

To explain the geography a little bit, Hualien is located on the mountainous east coast of Taiwan, roughly a hundred or so miles south of Taipei. (Side note: The proper spelling in pinyin should be "Hualian" with an "a" but a quick search on Google reveals that there are 941,000 documents for [Hualien] versus 260,000 for [Hualian] so I'll go with the majority spelling.) There's a freeway that runs down the east coast of Taiwan, and it's very similar to California's Pacific Coast Highway in that it's very close to the coast and if there's been heavy rain, you should be pretty careful because the roads can be narrow and twisty. We took the safer route -- a three-hour train ride at 7 a.m. from the Songshan Train Station.

When I wrote earlier about planning the trip to Hualien, I described how we were terrified that we would end up destitute on the streets, but it all turned out very smoothly. We stayed at the Grand Taroko Formosa, which is the only hotel that's actually inside of Taroko National Park.

Other hotels were all about an hour's drive outside of the park, so we were in a pretty fantastic location. For the hotel itself, we were expecting a bit of a let-down, given the modest price and the fact that we'd been spoiled silly by the Grand Hyatt...but it turned out to be great. Very clean, English-friendly and full of good restaurants and little shops. The recreation area was fun too -- swimming pools, tennis courts, ping pong tables, and an extensive arcade complete with mini-bowling and whack-a-pup (yes, we spent one evening smashing puppy-heads with a mallet). The food was a bit less spectacular that what my relatives had been treating us to in Taipei, but perhaps that's not too surprising.

When we arrived at Hualien Train Station, a nice man from the hotel picked us up in a van and took us to the hotel. We had about an hour to settle in, and then we set off on our tour (also provided by the hotel for a small charge). The "hiking" was mostly on wide paved walkways that would probably mortify most hikers here, but the scenery was amazing.

The water was very clear and clean. Apparently the gorgeous turquoise color comes from the calcium carbonate in the marble that forms the gorge. Here's a picture from the Shakadang Trail:

The roads and trails along the gorge were also an amazing feat of engineering, as they were carved from a sheer cliff face by hand by Chiang Kai-Shek's army. At the hotel there were black-and-white pictures of guys standing precariously on wooden scaffolding poles jammed into the cliff-side, chipping away with their pickaxes. Hundreds of men died during the construction of the Taroko Highway, and the Eternal Spring Shrine was built to honor their memory.

The tour also took us to the beach.

This allowed me to back up enough to get a good picture of how tall and enormously steep mountains were. (That's Chris in blue, standing under the little roof, and I'm taking the picture with my back to the ocean, while trying not to let my shoes get wet.)

The last interesting observation about the tour was less about the scenery and more about our fellow tour-takers. There were six couples total on our tour (including ourselves), and three of these couples featured a Chinese chick with a white guy. None the other way around. I guess we really are a trend.

Finally, before we left for Taipei, I got calls from my dad insisting that we must remember to buy lots of HualienShu, which is a special treat from the area. They're like round, fat little cookies (maybe about the size of a plum in diameter, but flatter) where the inside is made from either mashed sweet potato or mashed taro, and the outside is sort of like the outsides of a Fig Newton. I thought they were pretty tasty, but perhaps six bags of them was overkill. :-)

We'd definitely recommend the Taroko Gorge to anyone who visits Taiwan, especially if you're looking for someplace to escape from the city. It was one of the best highlights of our trip!