A Tourist in Taipei

The first morning in Taipei we were on our own. Before his family arrived that afternoon, My Husband and I were on a mission - well, 2 missions in fact - 1) Buy a sim card for our phone (his idea not mine!) and 2) get train tickets for the second part of our trip. We were prepared for a difficult task since we didn't speak Mandarin.

We found a 7Eleven and asked about a sim card. The girl at the counter smiled and shook her head. She couldn't understand us, but she very sweetly did her best to understand our sign language. Behind us a young employed asked if he could help, in pretty sound English too. He took care of us, and seemed delighted and proud (as he should be) that he could communicate with us. They didn't have what we needed, but he took us outside and gave us directions to a shop that he thought could. We were both very impressed by his helpful attitude.

As it turned out coverage in Taroko Gorge would be patchy and we'd have wi-fi in our room. My Husband decided to go out on a limb and forgo the sim card - yay  - freedom!

At the train station, we had a similarly lovely interaction with the guy in the information kiosk. He figured out which train would be best for us and then wrote out the specific thing for us to ask for which we brought like trusting children to the ticket both and purchased our tickets. It was that easy

We thought that not speaking Mandarin would be our biggest challenge in Taiwan, but it turned out that the people were so kind, friendly and eager to make us as comfortable that, in fact, our biggest challenge was leaving!

We spent a weekend in Taipei with My Husband's family. Our Nephew spoke Mandarin, Cantonese and English, so we were all able to communicate with each other and with the locals.

Taipei is a lovely city. Think Hong Kong, with breathing space. It had a really futuristic feel with it's ultra modern buildings and malls. At night the streets were lit up and felt safe and welcoming.

My Husband was fascinated by Taipei 101 - so named because it is 101 stories high. When it was built it claimed the status of the worlds tallest building and still ranks amongst the top ten.

 

But what intrigued us was the golden damper that earthquake-proofed the building. Ambitious to build such a high building in such a seismically active area, the engineers suspended this globe on a hydraulic system to counteract the swing and sway of the building during an earth quake to prevent it from coming down.

 

So we had to nerd out and go see it. Unfortunately, it seemed that half of China had the exact same idea at the exact same time! Bus loads of Chinese tourists had arrived just before us. The queue for the elevators took an hour and a half - each way - even with the world record for fastest elevator.

 

Now that China is "opening up," Taiwan is a popular holiday destination. That said, if you want to get to the top of the Empire State Building, Eiffel Tower, CN Tower or view most other high profile tourist spots in the world you will be faced with long queues, so if you absolutely must go, be prepared.  Otherwise, I thought Taipei 101 was just as  beautiful from the ground looking up - even at night.

 

Generally, I'm not a museum person. I do find myself apologizing for that. I wish I could get excited about museums and art galleries, as it seems so cultured and grown-up but, well, I am who I am.

I do love miniatures (doll houses, train sets, town planning models etc) so I reckoned the miniatures museum would be worth a look. I wasn't wrong! I took hundreds of photos but later realised that I should have included scale in all of them.

For example - would you believe that this candelabra is  only two inches across?

 

I stuck my hand into some pictures so you could get a feel for the scale.

 Take some time on each photo and enjoy the attention to detail.

 And amazingly this miniature had miniatures of its own!

They had Buckingham Palace and European Market scenes - I made slideshow of the other pictures I took.

Miniatures Museum - picture slideshow

There are lots of museums in Taipei, but apparently if you can (or will) only go to one it should be the National Palace Museum.

Once inside you cannot take photographs. Perhaps that is what engaged me so much in the Miniatures museum.

So what did I think? Well, it was a rainy day so an indoor activity was good. It was very crowded, and the exhibits were very old. Some have come a long way to be there and the story (or speculation) behind that was interesting. I managed to do about an hour and a half and then discovered they had a really nice coffee shop!

If museums are your thing, you will love Taipei. This, from a gal who found the museums in Amsterdam boring (sorry)!  And I think  if when I go back, I'd like to visit the Jade Museum as I really liked looking at the ting intricate carving on the jade. Perhaps I'm being converted into a museum goer after all?

More to come on Taipei....


Byddi Lee

Taiwan - a tasty treat!

My name is Byddi and I am a travel-a-holic!

In order to celebrate my Husband's birthday this year - a big birthday - one with a  zero in it, we wanted to go somewhere special. There were several boxes that needed to be checked for this trip.
1) It had to be somewhere neither of us had been before.
2) We wanted a direct flight, regardless of duration of flight. We simply wanted to get on the plane, get off the plane and be there.
3) The biggest treat for him (and for me) would be to spend some time with with his family, so we wanted somewhere handy to Hong Kong.

Taiwan ticked all those boxes and more.

Apart from Hong Kong, I've seen nothing of the "Far East," or I should say "Far West," since that's the direction you travel from San Jose.

Tapei, the capital city, is a 14-hour flight from San Francisco (SFO). We flew with EVA Air, a Taiwanese airline, and it was one of the most comfortable economy flights I've ever taken. The aircraft was clean, well staffed (the Taiwanese cabin crew were a preview of the wonderful people we would meet later on our trip) and the food was good.

The toilets had lots of nice little extras, such as moisturizing hand lotions and lavender face spritzers. It was the first time I've used misting sprays on a flight, and I really noticed the difference in that my skin and nose did not get as dry as it usually does in the harsh airplane AC.

As we disembarked, I found it hard to believe that fourteen hours of my life had just passed. The time had flown by (pun intended!) I'd watched 4 movies, started reading an excellent novel (The Snow Child - Eowyn Ivey), managed to snooze for a few hours (despite the mandatory screaming child on board) and had food carried to me while I sat and relaxed.

For flights this long, its' a good idea to bring some snacks of your own. The airline did provide crackers the whole way, but I did hanker for more tasty treats.

We landed in Taipei late, and it was nearly midnight by the time we'd gotten our bags and headed to the taxi rank. The taxi from the airport cost T$1200 ($40) for a 40min ride. We'd photocopied and enlarged the name of our hotel so that it was easy to read and we didn't have any linguistic problems. This approach worked well.

The first thing we noticed about Taipei when planning our trip was what great value the hotels were. We paid the same for a 5-star hotel in Taipei as we'd pay for a 3-star in big cities or holiday hot-spots in  the USA.

We chose the Sheraton Taipei (as you do!) and we weren't sorry. The room was lovely, equipped with everything you could want. The bed and pillows totally zonk-out inducing. But the best thing was the loo. Yes, you read that correctly -the loo, john, jacks, bog, toilet - call it what you will, was totally teched up. What a treat for my nerdy Husband!

The seat was plugged in to a box on the wall and for a few minutes my husband had me convinced that it was hooked up to the internet until I asked , "Why would it be online?"

That said, it had lots of party tricks. This was more than just a toilet. The seat was heated, like, all the time and not just after someone else had warmed it up for you. It took some getting used to - odor-free warmth!

There were water jets to clean your nether regions, with special buttons for jets especially designed for each gender. The coup-de-ta, a blast of air to dry you off - seriously! (Button on the far right.)

Next morning we went to breakfast, safe in the knowledge that everyone had nice clean bums (let's face it, who wasn't going to play with their toilet, right?)

Clean bums aside, it was the best breakfast buffet I have ever come across - period. There were at least five different cuisines at play from French bakery pastries and croissants, with dozens of choices, to Japanese, Chinese, western fry-ups and an excellent fruit station. I helped myself to mizo soup, a boiled egg, bbq pork steamed buns (my favorite dim sum item), French crusty bread liberally smeared with nutella, green tea muffins...in short, a smorgasbord of international treats!

This set the food tone for the rest of the trip. Taiwan has it all cuisine wise, and it is a great destination for foodies. The bakery shop displays alone were enough to make me salivate.

The Taiwanese people themselves are such wonderful hosts. They made us feel welcome and managed to communicate with us even when we didn't have a common language - they speak Mandarin, my Husband speaks Cantonese and English, and I'm a one-lingo-wonder! I was completely humbled by how genuinely nice and helpful the Taiwanese were.

If we looked lost at all there was always someone who'd say, "Can I help you?" And said in such as way as to give you space so you didn't feel like you'd just walked into an up-market boutique without enough money, or make you reach for your purse in case they'd want paid for their services!

This truly lovely nation made us feel comfortable, welcome and relaxed all week, and I can't wait to tell you all about it. If you are contemplating a trip to Asia, think Taiwan - it has it all!

Over the next couple of posts, I will tell you about the sights of Taipei, and the wonders of the beautiful Taroko Gorge on the East Coast. Just a snippet of what Taiwan has to offer. And to paraphrase Arny - We'll be back!

I hope I've whetted your appetites for more!

Byddi Lee

You know it's been a wet winter in California when...

You have a plethora of mushrooms springing up all over your yard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

You realize you need to trade your car in for a hybrid, and you don't mean between gas(petrol) and electric.   
 

 
You run outside to make a rain-man.

You've forgotten exactly how high the hills behind your house are.

 

You've been in your garden so little that the squirrels have undertaken to plant their own bulbs outside their burrow in your wall. (Not kidding - they planted these daffodils...I don't know where the bulbs came from, but they didn't get them from my bulb garden...)

You wonder why you decided to install those solar panels this winter - yeah great timing!

Your bulb garden is going gangbusters even though you can't remember the last time you applied water to your yard.

You know you will have a riot of poppies come April.

You go on vacation to Taiwan and get dryer weather! More to follow on that...

Byddi Lee

From mountain tops to the bottom of the deep blue sea

Hawaii is the land of heart-breakingly beautiful sunsets. What better place to view these sunsets than from the top of the world's highest mountain? Measured from base (under the sea) to top Manu Kea beats Everest. It peaks at 13,796 feet (4,205 m). The nice thing about Manu Kea is that you can drive all the way to the top ...kind of!

Parts of the road up to the peak are four wheel drive. Add to this the fatiguing effects on drivers of altitude, which may include headaches dizziness and nausea, compounded with the chance of snow -yes - snow in Hawaii. Well, we thought it prudent to book ourselves onto a tour with Hawaii Forest and Trail. The bus was okay, though not quite "luxury". The food (dished out at an old farm half way up) was basic and edible but not fancy nor with a scenic view in any way. The cost was painful! At $200 per person (I think that did include taxes) we could just as easily have hired a four wheel drive vehicle for the day...if we'd had the nerve to drive the thing at altitude, over snow...so instead we paid a total of $400 for being big scaredy cats. In fairness, we rarely do the bus tour thing, and I was looking forward to being looked after. The excellent driver/tour guide however saved the day. He was really well informed and enthusiastic about sharing that information.

We left Kona at 1pm and drove up and up and up. We stopped a few times for photo ops - each stop the view trumping the last, each stop forcing us to dig into our rucksac for another layer of clothes! We trawled through the climate zones, comparing visas to others we'd seen on our travels elsewhere on the planet. It's a running joke amongst some of my travel friends that everywhere looks, "Just like Donegal." To wit I posted a shot of Hawaii and one of Donegal on a friends facebook page asking him to choose which was Hawaii and he got it wrong!

Manu Kea plays host to all sorts of nerdy wonders.

There is the Really Long Baseline Array. A system of ten radio telescopes that has the sharpest vision of any telescope on earth. Apparently it is has such good resolution that you could read a newspaper in Los Angeles if you were standing in New York...though why you'd want to is beyond me...haven't these guys heard of the internet?

 

The silver sword fern grows on Manu Kea's high altitude slopes, so endangered now that there are high tech fences deployed to protect it from grazing sheep. Okay, so the fences are aren't as high tech as the toys the physics dudes have, but for biologists, well they're the bomb!

 

Nearer the top the temperatures really topple, and our heads felt light and somewhat woozy coping with the thin air. More huge telescopes line up like alien sentinels, eye/ears pricked searching the heavens as if hoping that ET will show up and take them home.

 My physics degreed Husband loved it. As did I, were I not so cold!

It was hard not to flood these posts on Hawaii with sunset shots. Each one screamed "pick me" but I didn't give in. You'll have to be happy with this.

As the sun slid into a cauldron of clouds, we trundled back down to the 9000 feet mark to the visitor's center and our eyes turned skywards. They have over 300 nights of clear sky a year. Spectacular star gazing, due to the thin air at this altitude had been promised and the tour even sets up a portable telescope for us. However, we choose one of the under 65 occasions a year where the high clouds did not dissipate. I was bitterly cold and bitterly disappointed. I decided to look for the silver lining in that cloud and just be thankful and happy that I was there, that I could come back some day, hire a 4WD and do the trip at least as far as the visitors center to see the clouds without having to sink $400 into it. Our tour guide did a spectacular job of telling us about the stars anyway, drawing them with his laser pen on the side of the building!

While in Kona, we stayed at King Kamehameha's Kona Beach hotel. It was the perfect spot, right on the beach, right in the town. They served breakfast right by the beach. I was in heaven. I wanted somewhere that I could go for a quite swim every morning without us having to get in the car and drive somewhere. From our room we could see the evening lu'au. We didn't get a chance to go to one so it was kind of nice to watch from our balcony.

My husband does not share my love of water - picture a cat marrying a fish. But he did try snorkeling (and in the past even tried scuba) and even took some pictures of me under water doing my mermaid thing.

Snorkeling turned out to be our holiday compromise. Me pulling My Husband under water, wanting him to scuba, him tethering us to dry land, wanting to stay above water. The result - neither of us got what we wanted but we both learned that next time we'll each do our own thing.

On this occasion we booked a tour with Fair Winds for an afternoon of snorkeling at the Captain Cook monument - where Captain Cook met his demise during a tussle over a stolen boat.

The water was beautiful! The fish were abundant, and whilst I remain forever spoiled by the great Barrier Reef in a "its never as good as the first time" sense, I always love the glory of the underwater garden as created by the corals.

My husband endured snorkeling for a half an hour before heading back to the boat, but I had my fellow fish for company - I'm a Pisces - no surprise there.

There were some eels and lots of fish but I didn't see any turtles. I saved a turtle's life on the Great Barrier reef about 10 years ago. He wedged himself between two rocks that were closer together at the top than the bottom. When I found him he was weakly struggling, so I pulled him free, and he swam off to the surface for a much needed breath of fresh air. Anyways, he nor any of his friends turned up! Nonetheless, I was the last person out of the water, the staff threatening to leave me behind if I didn't get on board.

Eleven years ago I participated in a Dolphin and Whale project in  South Africa. Well, those guys came out in force! On our way back to Kona, we were delighted to be joined  by a pod of spinner dolphins. They seemed to greet us joyously and raced the twin hulls of the catamaran, lining up in the slip stream and jostling for prime position reminding me of kayakers playing on a wave. They even angled their bodies to look up at us hanging over the rail looking dawn at them.I could swear they made eye contact with me. They embodied such zest for life, such fun and freedom that we all shared it for the twenty minutes or so that they traveled with us. Even though I'd sworn not to indulge in those "swim with dolphin" tours on the grounds that they are not that healthy for the dolphins (having cringed at accounts of damaged dorsal fins and dolphins too exhausted to hunt) and could even be risky for us (imagine frolicking with a wild pack of wolves on land) had the boat stopped I'd have been the first one in with them. 

They were truly magnificent and possibly the highlight of a trip jam-packed with highlights!

Byddi Lee

Kona Hawaiian Resort on Dwellable