I’m sitting at an
outdoor café in the Cilan Resort in Datong Township, Yilan, Taiwan. We spent last
night here in the main building, not one of the bungalows on the slope down toward the Lanyang River. The resort rests where the Lanyang is
converged upon by the Dowan and Tiangu’er Creeks before emptying miles downstream into the Pacific Ocean on Taiwan’s east coast. It
isn’t Three Rivers that converge at Pittsburgh -Monongahela, Allegheny River and Ohio; it’s merely a dry wash most of the
year, where watermelon is harvested, that naturally channels Taiwan’s
torrential plum and typhoon rains off the mountains and into the seas. It is a beautiful spot, with clean cool air a few hours from sweltering Taipei; a perfect place to get away from it all for a few days, and so inexpensive, you won't believe the value.
My wife booked a three-day two-night trip
with EZ Travel that made all the connections and gave us a choice of lodgings
and attractions. Our first night was spent in Hualien at the Parkview Resort
Hotel which had exercise rooms, rock climbing wall, and an enormous outdoor pool that I swam around in after twenty laps in the indoor pool. After breakfast, a van came to
drive us to the train station for an express north to Yilan where another
van took us solo an hour’s ride along the Lanyang River to the Cilan Resort,
but let me not get ahead of myself.
On the train south towards Hualien, I saw a familiar sight; the cement pits and factory operated by the Asia Cement Corp., owned by Far Eastern Group. Though it has operated for 60 years despite being in a geologically sensitive zone, the Ministry of Economic Affairs extended the corporations mining right another 20 years. The KMT mayor of Hualien is nowhere to he found to comment.The corporation sells its cement more cheaply to China than it does to Taiwan. The minister who approved the extension resigned soon after. When we go on vacation in Taiwan, we ignore the things we cannot do anything about .
We had left the house 6:30 Wednesday morning, too early for Taiwan Rail, so
we took a taxi to the Taichung HSR Station. We had to make a connection at Taipei Station; EZ Travel has their own car on the diesel that circles the island
east and west. When we
arrived in Hualien four hours later, a van was waiting to bring our tour group
to the beach for a short look, a restaurant for lunch, and then to
Taroko Gorge.
As
beautiful as Taroko Gorge is, we couldn’t drive very far, not to the house Chiang Kai-Shek appropriated as a KMT hostel, and not as far as the room above
the store near the Buddhist monastery where we had stayed twenty-eight
years ago, but far enough to see the gorge’s natural beauty without being
inundated by swarms of Chinese tourists who had had their travel taps
corked by the PRC a few years ago. We couldn’t go into the gorge more than a
few miles due to the natural disasters destroying the road Japanese colonizers
had carved into and through its marble cliffs. The earthquake of 1999 was the
last straw for the road that used to go cross-island (189 kilometers, around 5.5 hours by car) though Guguan to
Taichung. It never completely opened after that;
the last three weeks of torrential plum rains did further damage with rock
slides that covered the road. We were lucky to spend a few hours walking a
section of roadside and then up to a visitor center before leaving to meet the Parkview Hotel.
After
checking into our room, we went down for the buffet dinner included in the package and spent the evening checking out the grounds including the
recreation center and the pool area, but we were so tired, we called it a day
and went up to sleep. I was awake at six o'clock to go down to the internet
room to check my e-mail and then go swimming when the pools opened. The indoor pools were for laps and for children. Outdoors, the pools were enormous. Children could enjoy the shallow waters near the little bridges and there was a large deep circular pool for adults. The inflated tubes, some large enough for adults, rested on the side awaiting the fun time swimmers later on. I did my laps and met my wife for buffet breakfast
At
eleven o’clock, we were among those guests driven back to the Hualien train
station, but we all went separate ways. Our way took us north for an hour ride
to Yilan where we were picked up by a van and driven to the Cilan Resort We waited for
three o’clock check-in looking through a museum, one of Chiang Kai-Shek’s
summer homes, a place he had slept in twice. After resting a while, we took the
path up the mountain side behind the CKS Guesthouse for an hour hike. It was a
wonderful little trail with a gazebo to rest in and plenty of surprises along
the way. We met a monkey face to face! I spotted him on the path up a ways and
he walked towards us on the rail of the wooden trail bridge. We stood still and
as the ‘Monkey King’ passed I took pictures. The cicadas chirped noisily in the
tropical vegetation surrounding us. A family of monkeys climbed a tree in the
forest as a drizzle kept the cool humid air refreshing.
After
the hike, we went for dinner at the Cilan Resort dining room; a set meal with
extra Taiwan beer. We chatted, tipsy and ready to go to bed for our early
morning drive up to Divine Trees Garden. Then, I spotted a gentleman on the café
patio opening instrument cases on a covered table; a clarinet, flute, and saxophone.
Soon he was playing along with pre-recorded music some gentle tunes that
attracted further guests. It was a nice way to top off the day and, with the
Taiwan beer, enough to put us to sleep.
Early
the next morning, after a small breakfast, we got into two twelve-seater buses
and headed up the winding road to Divine Trees Garden. The road turned onto a
gravel path to take us further up the mountain when private cars are prohibited
and attendance regulated. There are hundreds of Taiwan Red Cypress trees in the
Chamaecyparis zone, many thousands of years old, are amazing to see. Looking
like ancient giant broccoli, the Japanese colonizers and Chinese
retrocessionists had ignored them in favor of mining the cedar trees’ more versatile
lumber, and so they remain in one of the three spots they can be found in the
world, the others being Japan and the western U.S. The tour guide spoke in Mandarin but the brochures at the resorts were in English. My wife and I walked a three
kilometer trail through the forest listening to the loudest cicadas in Taiwan carefully over piles of wild Taiwan deer droppings. The weather
cooperated, cool and dry, and our energies were revived by the primitive woodland
without a crowd of tourists to ruin the atmosphere. It may not smell as bracing
as the cedar spicing Alishan, but this forest is Divine.
After
a box lunch the tour guide had provided we were driven back to the Cilan Resort
to await our 3:30pm bus to Yilan’s new highway #5 through a thirteen kilometer-
long Guinness record tunnel back to Taipei. As we alighted from the tour bus,
the rain drops started falling. We rushed to the sheltered open-air café patio
as the sky opened up in time to await our trip back with a cappuccino near the
riverside and tall green mountain, glad we weren’t heading up to Divine Tree
Garden that afternoon. As weekend guests arrived awaiting their three o’clock
check-in, the multi instrumentalist returned to serenade us with sweet flute
solos pleasing me, the only Caucasian guest there, with classic western melodies
along with Taiwanese standards.
Returning to Taipei after the two-hour drive, we alighted outside the Sun
Yat-Sen Memorial Hall and took the Metro to Taipei Station’s Q Square for dinner
and honey beer at Le Ble D’Or Restaurant before catching our HSR train back to
Taichung. EZ Travel had planned a mid-week getaway that took
our breath away and didn’t tire us out. It was better than driving ourselves or making all the reservations on our own, for only a few dollars more.
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