Biking along the west coast

Taiwan, ,

We made it to day two! It’s been another long day, but if the guides are to be believed, harder days lie ahead. I’m sure that’s a shocker for all involved. I’ll do my best to sum up Day 2, but honestly, everything’s been such a blur, and I’ve noticed and seen too many new things to all be recorded.

Day 2/9: Hsinchu to Lukang (102 km)

I slept (though not enough by my standards) until 6 am this morning, which was when we received our morning call. It was a slow trek to get everything packed and downstairs, so it’s a good thing I showered the night before. Our breakfast was exemplary as usual, as we’ve seen at pretty much every hotel in Taiwan. And then we were off! Super early Sunday morning, there was pretty much no traffic heading out of Hsinchu, and we coasted on out casually.

Today, we made seven or eight stops in total. Some were after about 7 or 8 km (usually after a bit of a climb), but some were kind of far in-between, like after 22 km. At each stop, riders are urged to make sure to address any issues about their bike right away so the mechanics on the team can take a look and tune it up for you. Then you head to the bathroom, fill up your water, and grab some snacks. Their food game is on point, and it’s a good thing, because we’re all eating a lot more than we usually do, and expending up to 4000-6000 calories a day. There are about three or four kinds of fruit, bananas, nectarines, oranges, and maybe something else too. Then there’s three to four different kinds of Taiwanese biscuits and cookies with chocolate or cheese or preserved veggies. There are packets of Pocari Sweat that you can dump into your water bottle, and then fill up with water. For those who don’t want to have Pocari, they also offer some straight-up salt, which helps your body hydrate better. At lunch and dinner, we’ve been feted with some amazing amounts of fish, tofu, pork – typical Taiwanese fare. One of the Canadians I met has opted for vegetarian, and they’ve brought out some excellent dishes just for her, including these lightly battered and fried mushrooms with Taiwanese basil. I can’t complain about any of the food.

Shortly after we came out of Hsinchu today, we made it to the coast. We spent a leisurely morning biking down the coast, gazing at the wetlands on the west coast. Steve and I have visited the Gaomei Wetlands near Taichung, and this was quite similar. The muddy ground sprinkled with short bushes and grasses stretch out for what seems like a hundred meters, dotted here and there by white herons and other birds standing in the mud. Off in the distance, we could see large windmills of the modern variety – tall and three-bladed clawing at the sky – which slowly moved by as we biked south. It was a perfect morning, weather in the sixties, and an overcast sky. Eventually that gave way as we turned inland to more rice paddies, stretching out. Yesterday’s rice paddies were smaller affairs, constrained by the twisting and turning roads and hills that we went through. Today was almost entirely flat. We crossed several very high broad bridges that looked over some narrow channels of water, watching the sun glitter on the creeks and rivers below.

We made two interesting stops today. The first was at 台鹽 Taiyen Company, which makes a popular brand of alkaline ion water here as well as other foods and beverages containin salt. They even had a “Museum of Salt” at their headquarters here. For our snack at this rest stop, the Giant guides brought out salty popsicles in many different flavors. I managed to get one of the last almond flavored popsicles, which was sweet and savory, tasting like the almond milk teas that they make here in Taiwan. It was a fun treat! The second stop was right after lunch at headquarters for Giant Bicycles. It was there we learned that we had among us the former CEO of Giant Bicycles, who is now retired and enjoys going around the island with his wife. He and she were respectively on their eleventh and eighth trips around the island. How’s that for impressive? #lifegoals We also got to see some of the cool prototypes they had on display, even though it was a Sunday, and the factory wasn’t open.

Today was a big day, because for many people including me, it was our first day of riding more than 100 km. Yesterday, we made 92 km, and today 110 km. It is pretty empowering to see these numbers that would have made me wince just last week. We now all have a much better sense of our bodies and our strength and how much we can accomplish in a day. When they announced at our last stop it was only another 12 km until our hotel, a cheer rose up because everyone saw that as being pretty light work of less than an hour! Tomorrow is going to be relatively light too – an easy, flat 83 km to Chiayi. But the day after that will be significantly more challenging – 130 km from Chiayi to Kaohsiung. And we haven’t even really started climbing the mountains. That will be Day 5 and 6 in Pingtung and to Zhiben (near Taitung).

Tonight, we stopped in Lukang, a small town near the coast which is just outside of Changhua. After dinner at our hotel, I went with some people from our lunch group (a woman from SF, her cousin from Toronto, and a couple from LA) to a nearby massage place. I got a 30-minute full body massage that focused on my lower body for just 399 NT (~13 USD). It was a lovely experience, and I now have many of the kinks in my spine worked out as well as some of the knots in my quads and hamstrings. It was such a good idea I’m thinking we should do it again tomorrow night!

For tomorrow, I want to remember to write about my new philosophy about climbing hills (and physics), our Giant tour guides, and accommodations in more detail! Maybe when I’m not scrambling to finish everything before getting to bed, but that’s not going to be tonight.

Around the island!

Taiwan, , ,

We’re returning to this blog with some exciting news. Connie, at least, is on the road again. Literally! This week, I am fulfilling a long-held dream of biking around the island nation of Taiwan. It’s spring break, and the weather is perfect – mid teens Celsius, nothing above 70 degrees. Steve’s going to take some more convincing that a 9-day bike trip with more than 100 kilometers a day is what he really wants to do, but even though I’ve never done a multiple-day bike trip before, I jumped in head first as I do with so much. You decide whether that’s a good thing or not.

Day 1/9: Taipei to Hsinchu (91 km)

This morning, I woke up right before 6 am, and we brought me in full riding gear and my luggage to Songshan train station. I arrived just after 7 am to greet 49 fellow riders and our crew, the Giant Bicycles Travel Agency. Giant is a Taiwanese company that is known the world over for their excellent bikes, and in Taiwan, they also run a travel agency which brings bike riding and touring trips to an art. We’re going around the island counter clock-wise, and in nine days, will rack up more than 950 kilometers. Meep.

So it’s been a long day, because I’m typing this at 10 pm. I feel less tired than I should be (especially in my legs), but I think that’s mostly because it’ll kick in all the next day. At times, I felt incredibly happy because I was flying along in the wind, reaching speeds of up to 35 or 40 km an hour, but when we reached the two hills that we climbed today, I felt like I wanted to die. So there have been ups and downs, literally though not accordingly. We made multiple rest-stops, one after the first hill where we met a local park dog who wagged his tail very hard when he saw our white van. Our driver told us that he’s excited to see the group every single week. After all, Giant runs this tour starting pretty much every single Saturday. I felt so humbled thinking about all the people who have gone around the island, and some of the folks on our tour have done it multiple times before. It makes me feel like I’m part of something bigger and makes it feel not as hard as it could be.

We took roads to Dadaocheng where we met the river, and biked on river paths until we got to Sanxia. The riverside paths were nice, but the roads were not as scary as I felt, because we have so many people with us – the drivers are on high alert the whole time they’re going past. For lunch we stopped at a fish restaurant, which kept live fish in concrete tanks near the parking lot, and they served us fish soup, fried fish, broiled fish, and fish fillets, and I’m sure I’m missing something else. There was exactly one dish of cabbages. Sounds like a pescatarian-specific meal? The fellow rider I got to know best (and sat next to during lunch) was Debbie, a Scottish lady with an accent so heavy that I initially thought she was from Eastern Europe or something of the sort. But no, she just grew up in Glasgow, and is now living in Beijing these days. I also met a trio of adult siblings from California by way of Hong Kong, a Canadian from Toronto who bubbled over with good cheer, as well as a couple from Los Angeles who were intending originally to go on a scooter trip around the island. And our table was rounded out by two Taiwanese people who mostly watched the entire lunchtime proceedings with bemusement as they had accidentally sat with the English table. That was pretty funny.

When Steve asked how the trip was going, I told him it was going to be easier and harder than I imagined. The reason why it’s easier is that Erin was right: when you have the right bike, you can go faster than 25 km/ an hour with no issue on flat ground. She gave me a lot of advice beforehand, and this is proving to be true! We’re on the rental bike Giant Rapid, which has 27 gears and probably only weighs 4 kg overall. It’s incredibly light. On the other hand, hills and mountains are pretty dreadful. I have never been forced to go up a gradual incline for as long as 7 km, and I’m sure it’s not going to be the hardest hill we encounter. Both times I was climbing hills, my chain actually slipped off, and I got some grease in my nails and hands trying to put that back together. I also end up at the back of the pack, and it’s still a work-in-progress to understand how all of this gear shifting and stuff works.

When we came flying down the second hill, we went past a number of beautiful rice paddies. The same slope that we were flying down made it naturally easy to irrigate these paddies, with the water from the higher ones flowing into the lower ones. I have no idea what time it is in the rice growing season here, but it looked green and fertile and very bucolic. The countryside was great, because there was very little going on. Our last stop, we had about 17 km before we got to our hotel in Hsinchu, and it took more than an hour because we struggled with lights and traffic the whole way. When we were heading out of Taipei, a woman on a scooter actually told the lady sitting sitting next to me at a stoplight that it was much safer to be riding on the riverside and that we should not do the roads. I wish I could see that woman’s face when we get on the freeway in the next few days! Not to end on a super sad note, but we saw a cat that had been hit by a car. Someone actually moved it off the road right before we went past, which I appreciate, but it was sad. RIght after that, we passed seemingly dozens of pet stores, juxtaposing scenery filled with brightly colored signs, lights, and food. It made me feel like it’s all too easy to become a casualty of the roadside yourself.

Enough thoughts. It’s time to get to bed. Morning call is at 6 am, and we will be off to Chiayi before I know it. More missives from the road to come.

P.S. I forgot to add that when I arrived in Hsinchu, Steve informed me I had forgotten my glasses in Taipei, so I had the singular pleasure of shopping for new frames and getting a new prescription and buying new glasses from Lohas Glasses in Hsinchu. Let’s put that in the unexpected expenses column, shall we? (On the bright side, they are cute, have red arms, and were my first pair of new glasses in like 6 years. Also, they were completed in half an hour.)

Gateway to Komodo National Park.

Indonesia, , , ,

We flew out of Yogykarta in the very early morning, leaving behind the island of Java for a stopover in Bali, and then an arrival in Flores, an island in East Nusa Tenggara. Though we waited in Bali for two hours, the flight on either end was just over an hour, in an Airbus A320 type of six-seater plane that brought us to a still up and coming part of Indonesia. Flores is known for its coffee, some hiking, and mainly the gateway to the Komodo National Park, islands situated just west of Flores and not easily accessible through other destinations. When we landed in Labuan Bajo, it felt like we had just flown back through time to an Indonesia that was much less developed.

The worn SUV that picked us up had a young man with a toothy smile and an older man who didn’t speak any English. We left the polished newly-built airport and rocked our way down the mostly dirt (some paved) roads to our lodge, which was thankfully quiet and clean. Our first afternoon there, we simply walked down the long dusty road (sans sidewalk) that comprises the main part of the town of Labuan Bajo, which took about half an hour in total, not because it was all THAT long, but because it was hard to navigate, and you had to . It was noisy, filled with little vans that came by every 3-5 minutes blasting rock music and decked out in neon, and people ducked in and out of them, the local unofficial bus service. There were some restaurants ranging from very high-end Italian food serving locations with pristine terraces over looking the bay to tiny local hole-in-the-wall without any sort of English signage out front. And a billion travel businesses – everyone advertised some sort of day trip or 2D/1N or 3D/2N tour to the Komodo National Park. You could find liveaboard experiences with A/Ced cabins, with open upper decks where you slept with other people on a giant mattress and a sheet wrapped around you. You could find tiny fishing boats that were repurposed for tourism purposes or large speedboats that could cover the same distance in half the time. We ventured into a few joints to get quotes back and forth, and ended up settling on one place. However, when we went out to go get our money from the ATM, it did not cooperate, and we ended up going back to our house to figure out if there were any problems. While Steve wrestled with his bank support on the Skype, I took a nap, and after visiting about all the ATMs in the town of Labuan Bajo, we finally put in 400.000 IDR (about $30 USD) per person for our day trip to Komodo National Park.  Continue reading Gateway to Komodo National Park. →

Java’s ancient temples.

Indonesia, , ,

Our third day and final day in Yogyakarta began really, obscenely early. We were up at 3:30 am for our earliest departure yet to see the sunrise at Borobudur Temple, an hour and a half outside of Yogyakarta. We picked up a breakfast box left by the staff at the homestay, and stumbled outside in the dark to a driver who ushered us inside a small van occupied by another couple who might have been French or Dutch. We swayed back and forth and slept for a while before arriving at the destination. At 4:30 am, we disembarked and ended up in an outdoor lobby with many other tourists, some looking wide awake, some very quiet and obviously just waking up. We paid our money and received tickets, a map of the complex, a sticker to wear, and a small hand flashlight, as it was still hours from dawn, and then proceeded slowly through the complex. Though the temple doesn’t officially do sunrise tours, the Manohara Hotel, which is on the grounds of the temple, allows people to visit before sunrise for a more expensive ticket price (450.000 IDR or $30 USD per person). Though easily the biggest expense we’d made so far (besides lodging and travel), it was totally worth it. We were able to make our way up the gigantic ziggurat-like structure of the Borobudur temple in near-darkness, with a trail of bobbing flashlights above and below us. After fifteen minutes of hiking up some of the biggest stairs I have ever encountered, we were at the top.  Continue reading Java’s ancient temples. →

Indonesia’s second city.

Indonesia, ,

Our trip to Indonesia really settled into a rhythm when we flew into Yogyakarta on our second day in the country. It’s just an hour or two away from Jakarta, on the southern coast of Central Java, but Yogya (pronounced Jog-ja) has a very different feel. Steve has developed a theory over our travels, that the second-largest and slightly lesser well-known city in each country, can usually be a much better value for your money. It’s usually less overwhelming, less populated, and cheaper, but often has much of the same amenities and conveniences. Think Kaohsiung instead of Taipei, Lyon instead of Paris, Split instead of Zagreb (although all of Croatia is convenient!), Osaka and not Tokyo, etc. etc. Yogya proved to be another point in favor of Steve’s second-city theory.

We took a local taxi service from the airport into town, just fifteen minutes to our Airbnb homestay. We had picked one close to the airport because we knew that our flight out would be very early in the morning (another recurring theme for this trip), and it proved to be amazing. Omah Garuda Homestay was very large, clean, and quiet, run by a family business. Tami, the receptionist, had an infectious smile and laugh, and welcomed us by name when we first came in. We first considered rushing off to have lunch downtown and seeing some of the historical sights in the city because they closed around 1 pm and 3 pm, but since we had three nights in the city, Steve and I called an audible, and decided to take a break. Continue reading Indonesia’s second city. →

Travels in Java.

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Three weeks ago, Steve and I set sail (I mean, flew over) for the island of Java, also known to the rest of the world as the most populated island in the nation of Indonesia. While we’ve been pretty active in visiting places in East Asia, Indonesia’s actually the first new country in Southeast Asia that we’ve been able to go to. I had been pushing for this for a while, so it was with a lot of excitement that we made our way onto the flight. In the days prior to our flight, there was a lot of wrestling with baggage (stupid 7 KG in-cabin allowance) and trying to pin down last minute details for each of our four destinations. Stella watched us pack with trepidation, and then we packed her off before we went to the airport, dropping her off at our preferred dog hotel near Taipei Main! Despite swearing them off, we took Air Asia on Saturday afternoon from Taipei’s Taoyuan Airport (TPE) to Kuala Lumpur (KUL)’s low-cost airline terminal, KLIA2.

Our first stop was actually KL! We didn’t leave the airport, but after landing in the evening around 9 pm, we headed to another exciting first: a capsule hotel! Capsule Transit is the name of the container-based capsule hotel that is situated in the airport here. It was a fairly cheap way to spend the night (~$50 USD), and as we found, fairly roomy too. We booked a queen-bed two-person capsule, and the entire space was subdivided into different male only or female only or mixed sections. Our capsule was on the ground, but some were on a second level that needed a short climb up the ladder. We spent so much time exploring the airport to find an ATM and a decent place to have dinner that we just collapsed into our capsule and fell asleep for six hours.  Continue reading Travels in Java. →

Two days in Macau.

China, , , ,

Despite being just over two hours away by plane, Steve and I had never been to Macau, a former Portuguese colony which is also a hop and skip away from Hong Kong. We decided on a whim to visit this week, and it was a fabulous decision. Macau is a strange little contradiction – a Chinese city with a strong Portuguese presence and heritage, an overseas European settlement now turned Special Administrative Region (SAR) but also a part of China at the same time. We spent two days walking through very twisty streets and ate a lot of sticky sweets and delicious food, and enjoyed seeing some awesome sights.

We flew into Macau on Tuesday in the middle of the day, and it was a bit rough of a start. First, we had no Internet access initially, because the 2G internet afforded by our T-Mobile cards overseas in almost every other country we’ve been to didn’t seem to be working. The driver of the 26 bus that Google had told us to take into the city gruffly informed us we should take the MT4 instead, and I was trying frantically to figure out if we had enough coins in HKD to get on the bus. After purchasing a SIM card out of a vending machine and identifying the MT4, we finally were on our way.

Macau is best known for its gambling, huge lavish and opulent buildings like the Venetian, Sands, and the Wynn. The golden flower shape of the Grand Lisboa skyscraper loomed over the city peninsula and was visible everywhere we went. Since neither of us were much interested in exploring the gambling aspect, though, we decided to make our focus the food and European legacy of Macau. After dropping things off at our hotel the Ole Tai Sam Un, we set off by foot for St. Paul’s Ruins. It’s the second best known thing in Macau, a former church that had been rebuilt and burnt down several times, with the 1843 conflagration leaving just its front façade intact. It sits above a wide flight of stairs and a small square, and today figures into the selfies of pretty much every tourist who visits Macau. The façade is beautiful, and about two feet thick, retaining weathered green bronze statues of St. Ignatius and St. Francis Xavier. We roamed around, and then walked up the hill beside it to the Fortaleza Monte, a small fort which had some beautiful views of the city and was also home to the Museum of Macau. We walked through the small museum, learning about different architectural styles and the history of the numerous forts that had been there before. Continue reading Two days in Macau. →

Return to the western motherland.

USA, , , ,

I’m fighting jet lag and some exhaustion in order to put some fingers to the keyboard. Twice in the past year or so, I’ve started an entry about our visits to Seoul and Kyoto/Osaka, but it’s so hard to encapsulate everything about a new visit to a new city, and yet that’s just what I want to do. Recently, we also went back to Taichung for a day, and in revisiting some of the blog entries I wrote in the summer of 2015 about our time there, I was reminded of not only how lovely some places were, but how I was transported back to that rhythm of life by the entries I wrote neatly documenting the minute details of our lives. It made me resolve that I’m going to spend more time putting that down, even imperfectly or piecemeal. Perfection is the enemy of getting anything done, as far as my blogging is concerned. So here’s some imperfection.

I had been planning my first trip back to the US since we moved to Taiwan, but it got moved up since I left my job at the end of December. Thus,  I scheduled it for late January to avoid the crush of Chinese New Year, but I forgot the temperatures I would be facing. In fact, I left all my scarves and gloves in Taipei, and the first day out here, I started bitterly regretting that fact. The weather is just one of the many things I’m startled by. I’ve taken to religiously smearing Vaseline on my lips before bed, and reviving my habit of lotioning up. The cold is not only cold – it’s dry. I raise static on my arms taking off and putting on sweaters, the ends of my long hair stick to my puffy jacket, and I actually shocked myself the other day, something I haven’t done since 2013 in Chicago! How cold is it, you might ask? After lows in the 40s Fahrenheit in Taipei, I’ve now been thrown into the lower 20s, with significantly less humidity and more wind. My phone still thinks I’m in Celsius territory, though, so it routinely reminds me that it’s -1 degrees Celsius outside, striking fear into the hearts of those who know me back in Taiwan. Thank goodness for long underwear and my double-coated method, although I did have to buy myself something resembling a hat and gloves the first day I was out.  Continue reading Return to the western motherland. →

Solo-navacation update!

Hong Kong, , ,

Tl;dr: We still travel, I’m just not as good as updating about it. Here’s some pictures of a day in Hong Kong!

The long version: It’s been just over a year since we moved to Taiwan, and we’ve been busier and busier! Some reasons for that: Steve’s app start-up is really taking off, I got a new job in April that keeps me really busy, and in May, we finally welcomed our puppers Stella to Taiwan. She’s becoming a circumnavacator too! Just because we haven’t been posting doesn’t mean we haven’t been traveling though: last November, we made a 48-hour trip to Shanghai and Beijing to see some family, in December we visited Bangkok and Krabi with my parents, and in March, we put a pin in a new country: a weekend in Seoul, South Korea. Oh, and we made another trip in June to Hong Kong, and hung out with Steve’s cousin. Maybe sometime we’ll write updates about those trips, but they were all really cool! I wanted to update this weekend given that Steve and I have both been on solo vacations lately, him to visit family back in the US, and me on a day trip this weekend. my Traveling solo is a really interesting experience to go back to after years and years of going places with each other, but I’m going to say that I prefer going places as a pair. We’ll let Steve weigh in on that eventually. *wink*

Continue reading Solo-navacation update! →

I want to write about running.

Taipei, Taiwan, ,

This is a travel blog, but sometimes, all the travel I do is around a park. I run the entire circumference of a park, about 750 meters, six times twice a week. For people keeping track at home, that’s 4.5 kilometers, just shy of 3 miles. It’s the “winter” in Taiwan, so I have a routine. On Mondays and Wednesdays when I get home from work, I put on a long-sleeved shirt, socks, sometimes gloves, and a headband that covers my ears, and place a few napkins into my pockets so I can blow my nose on my run. I plug in my headphones and head out to the park four blocks from home. For almost forty minutes, I dodge slow grandmas, people on their bikes, far too many people who can’t be bothered to look up from their phone, dogs, and the occasional corner vendor. Once or twice, I’ve even tripped and nearly fallen on my face. Occasionally, I hate running. Frequently, I think about skipping it. But the general trend is that I’ve come to like this ritual more and more for the endorphins afterwards, and for what it has helped me learn about myself.  Continue reading I want to write about running. →