After living in Switzerland and spending lot's of time in the Rocky Mountains, you'd think Herbert and I wouldn't be so impressed anymore with 'one more mountain range'. Not true. We found the Shiueshan Mountains to be different then what we'd seen in the past and very special. The first thing that made it different wasn't so wonderful, but definitely stood out in my mind... the road you take to get to the area. It's a winding road that hugs the side of the mountain as it slowly climbs it. Okay, normal for a mountain road. But what made it different was that it wasn't much wider than the width of one car. It seemed like every time we approached a blind curve, another car would come racing around from the other direction. Someone had to back up until an area of the road could be found where both cars could squeeze by each other. It was a bit frightening and slowed us down so much that the 100 Km (60 miles) from Chungli to the mountains took about three hours, but James did a great job of maneuvering the car around the curves. But let's move on to the 'special' things. The area of the mountains where we were is in the Kuan-wu part of the Shei-pa National Park and is a protected area. There aren't many people and very few businesses. Even though the park is a popular area for people from Taipei to go for fresh air and peace, I had the feeling that we were in a remote region with more nature than civilization. There was absolutely no commercialism. The main attraction for people coming to the mountains is hiking, and this was perfect with me. I was really missing my hikes in the forests around Oberwil and this particular weekend in the mountains was what I needed to fix that. The air was unbelievably fresh. We all just kept breathing deeply and saying things to each other like, "Can you believe that!" When I've been on vacations in the past with my mom, brother and sisters and all the their families, my brother Mike always encourages 'Mountain Hikes'. I've always ignored them and avoided them. Now I could slap myself. I had no idea what I was missing. My family would LOVE this mountain and it's miles and miles of very well maintained and mapped paths. We hiked both Saturday and Sunday and only saw a fraction of the area. The hotel where we stayed was a small hotel on the side of one of the mountains. It only had ten guest rooms and on the first night we were the only guests. The owners couldn't speak any English, but they were so friendly that it didn't matter. The only problem I had isn't really anyone's fault at all. It was simply a nature thing. It had to do with the the first night we were there. Not long after Herbert and I had gone to bed, I remembered that I needed to take some medicine. I got up, turned on the light and went into the bathroom to get some water. When I came back out to the room and looked at our bed, there was a HUGE black spider, on top of MY side of the blanket! I freaked out, a bit. I had some difficulty breathing until after Herbert flushed it down the toilet. I tried to get back to sleep, but spent most of the night imagining that he must have had many little friends and in my mind, I could see them all over the bed and floor. I was fine by the next day and told myself it's only nature. I decided that it was a small price to pay for all of the beauty we saw on our hikes. I'll let the pictures speak for everything else... |
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