Island Tour Day 3

Fun fact: the cubicles in an internet café can’t be locked. Maybe that’s why I tossed and turned all night. It was around 3 AM that I rented a blanket and finally slept a bit better. Waking up past 8, (rounding up, that’s basically eight hours of sleep), I looked up sights in the internet café, and before I knew it it was 9:30 — almost check-out time. Walking downstairs and looking out past the arcade, dense raindrops drew streaks of cold silver through the air, spraying the ground like machine-gun fire. Ah, it was pouring. Today Typhoon Mikla was passing by nearby, and Taipei was completely soaked. So we decided to head east and shelter from the rain in Yilan.

Train Anecdote

After boarding the train, the seat across from us was taken by a foreigner (A), with someone next to him who looked like his partner (B)? Whatever — the two of them were a team anyway, and they’d bought TRA bento boxes to eat on the train. At one station, an elderly man got on. Just as the doors closed, he shook his head at the foreigner eating his bento and grumbled (in Taiwanese-accented Mandarin): “Do you know why there are always rats on foreign trains? Because they always eat on the trains.” A seemed to catch on and started to put his food away. B immediately told him, “It is totally legal. He is bullshitting.” The old man might not have understood, but when he saw the foreigner wasn’t putting the food away, he started arguing on the spot, and the whole car watched them bicker — though nobody seemed surprised. After a few stations the old man got off; maybe he was too annoyed, or maybe it really was his stop. Either way, peace returned once he left.

Lanyang Museum

And so we rode the local train through the Snow Mountains, and the rain gradually let up. Honestly, every little station we passed made me want to hop off and explore, but it was raining outside and the next train might not come for two or three hours — if we got off at the wrong place, we might not reach the hotel that night. In the end we chose the safest option, Yilan Station. The rain had eased a bit, but it hadn’t stopped, so we could only do indoor activities, and we picked Lanyang Museum.

Its exterior looks like a cube lying on the ground, with the roof tilting about twenty degrees from the ground. Inside there’s a long escalator, and looking up from it gives a strange sense of dizziness — probably this peculiar structure tricking the brain into an illusion. That day there were two exhibition areas: a permanent exhibition and the Wushi Harbor Bicentennial Special Exhibition.

Carved Kavalan

Entering the exhibition area, this was the first piece to catch our eye. But it was so large that even with a wide-angle lens we couldn’t capture the whole carving. If you’re interested, check the museum’s official website for details.

While we were wandering, a big group of students suddenly poured in. From our observation, they were almost certainly high schoolers — a whole cohort traveling together at this time of year means graduation trips. Watching them have their fun brought back memories of my own high school graduation trip, except they were at Lanyang Museum while we’d gone to Kenting’s National Museum of Marine Biology and Aquarium. It suddenly hit me that the graduation trip was already three years ago — time really flies…

After finishing the exhibitions, we stepped outside to enjoy the view — there’s a loop of walkway around the museum. Just as we were about to set off, a light drizzle started, and it showed signs of growing. So we turned back and headed for our hotel for the night, a hot-spring resort in Jiaoxi.

Circumference Green Hot Spring Resort

When we got to Jiaoxi Station, the rain was coming down harder, and I had to put a rain cover on my backpack. Slipping into flip-flops and wading through the puddles across the road, a five-minute walk took us nearly ten before we finally reached the hotel. At check-in, the owner upgraded us to a bigger room for some reason — anyway, tonight we could get a good night’s sleep. Stepping into the room, a king-size double bed sat dead center, with room to walk on both sides, and on one side there was even space for a sofa; the gap between bed and TV was a meter or two wide. The upgrade was real.

Two of us for a little over a thousand NT to stay somewhere this nice — we lucked out this time. But things never go that smoothly: Yilan was starting to feel the typhoon’s effects, and we had only one set of clean clothes left. As for what happened next — tune in next time to find out.