Day1
Day2
Day3
Day4
Day5
Day6
Day7
Day 6. Tienhsiang -> Kuan Yun
Just like the day before, we didn't have much driving to do, but we had a lot of stopping so it took most of the day to get to Kuan Yun. This was the most painfully cold day we had so far.
This is the Catholic Hostel that we stayed at the night before. It was very pretty and there were winter flowers everywhere, including poinsettias.
There isn't much to the town of Tienhsiang, except the beautiful surrounding mountains and a very nice temple. This is the actual town.
And this is the temple.
The pagoda at the temple.
The buddha statue at the temple.
This is me performing a 'bye-bye' (bowing at the statues). No, I have not turned buddhist. A very excited lady thrust some incense sticks in my hand and told me to go around and do the 'bye-bye' to all the statues. I'm not sure what 'bye-bye' means in English, but it's just a way of showing respect for a shrine or statue, and you can do it by putting your hands together and bowing a few times.
Here's some of our veggie food we ate at the temple.
We drove our scooters 5km to our next stop- a hike at Huitowan over some suspension bridges. The entire trail, one way, is about 10km. Of course we didn't have time to do that, so we just hiked a few km over two suspension bridges.
This is one of the suspension bridges.
Time to hit the road again! We drove for what seemed like an hour, but I remember stopping to take this picture of the canyon, and I could still see Tienhsiang! The road was so windy that even after an hour we could see the town (sorry, you can't really see it in this picture because the resolution is so low).
Good thing they had safety rails! You can see one of the many tunnels that we went through in this picture.
More driving. This time we hit what I call a 'mountain wall'. I looked up at it and saw all the switchbacks and tunnels that brought us up over the mountain and into the clouds.
We made it over the mountain and found ourselves in the eery mist.
We also drove past this special old tree, but I was really too cold to care. After some persuasion from Mark, we quickly stopped to look at it.
The highway took us out of the clouds temporarily and we saw our first blue sky since we left the west coast. It really made a difference in the temperature. Too bad it was only temporary! It was beautiful.
I was painfully cold by the time we made it to our hostel (we had even seen snow by this point). I had on all the clothes that I brought, including a face mask. We had to share the dorm with many Taiwanese families. They thought we were crazy for being so cold, but I don't think they realized the difference between driving around in a heated car all day (only stepping out for a quick photo) compared to being on a scooter all day. Here's our dorm room and the view from our hostel.
