Chiayi -> Alishan -> Budai -> Puzi

Last week Florence and I took a trip to Southern Taiwan. We took the Ubus down to Chiayi a town just north of Tainan and stayed in a nice hotel for 2 days.

After arriving in Chiayi, we walked around the city sampling the "southern cuisine". It seems the vegetarian movement has fertile ground for expansion in Chiayi.

I don't know if this way of trimming the trees count as topiary, but Chiayi has many of them lining the wide streets.

On the second day, we took a minibus up to the park of the top of Mount Alishan. I have written about Alishan before as part of a school field trip when I was at Cheng Kung University.

http://mikeess-trip.blogspot.tw/2011/05/ali-shan.html
http://mikeess-trip.blogspot.tw/2011/05/ali-shan-lumber.html

As we drove up the mountain, we drove though the Tea farms.

Tea plants are actually bushes and in Taiwan there are 2 crops per year with the plants getting a "haircut" so that the better young tea leaves can be picked later. The road up the mountain was an engineer feat and follows the old RR that use to haul the timber out during the Japanese time. Now it's mostly a tourist destination.

It's been warm in Taiwan, the cherry tree along the road were beginning to bloom.

Alishan is one of Taiwan's highest mountains at 2300 meters, (7546 feet). It is a huge park, I had completely missed the huge old growth Taiwan red cypress trees. Many of the old growth stumps look like those in Washington State.

But some of the uncut Taiwan Red Cypress trees are more than 2000 years old, one that was felled by lightning in the 1950s was more than 3000 years old. I think this was a young one at about 1900 years old.

We took a local bus "down the mountain" and the driver picked up a drunk who talked the whole way down. He was funny, but at times a little scary.

On the 3rd day we traveled from Chiayi to the coast and back to Chiayi before taking the Ubus back to Taipei. The fishing town on the coast is called Budai, it had a great fresh fish market and a huge mountain of salt. Here a dump truck is adding to the salt mountain.

 On the way back to Chiayi we stopped at Puzi. Puzi was a city in Taiwan as early as 1684 and this temple has been on this site since that time.

But we also got a tour of the Water Treatment Plant in Puzi which was really interesting as it had an old water tower from the Japanese time. The dome on top marks it as Japanese rather than Chinese.

Also the bracing of the structs at the base are in the shape of the Japanese Rising Sun.

Our final visit was to the Taiwanese needlepoint museum.

They were working on projects that require a 100 times the patience I have.

But a lack of patience also got me into trouble as I came back to Taipei with a terrible case of diarrhea. Which I probably got from not washing my hands enough.