Location: Xuhai
Weather: rain 12C
Last night we ended up finding a campground just down the road right by the beach and I got to set up my bivy for the first time in a while. There was nobody else there even though it was the weekend and the start of the winter holidays for school kids because as the owner said, most Taiwanese people were driving up the mountains for a rare chance to see snow. We chatted a bit before it started raining and I found out that he used to work as a chef in Taipei before coming back down south and converting this piece of land into a campground. Despite the incessant rain and wind (thankfully I was under a tent pavilion) and dogs barking, I got a pretty good night of sleep (those who know me will understand that I can sleep like a rock through anything), better than the night before when I was bothered by numerous mosquitoes.
The rain and wind never went away and today will go down as one of the windiest cycling days ever. My Shenzhen friend had decided that he was going to ship some of his luggage back to Taipei so we parted in Kenting this morning as he went to take care of that. I made stops at Little Bay and Sail Rock before arriving at Eluanbi Lighthouse and the southernmost point of Taiwan. The wind got more and more fierce, making the sea more and more violent, to the point that I literally had to hold onto dear life to not be knocked over by the side wind. It felt just as bad if not worse than when I camped in Cape Disappointment, Washington last August (that same storm that had 700,000 people out of power in Vancouver), but it's probably not even a special weather advisory here with the much more extreme types of weather that Taiwan gets. The tailwind days are officially over as I head up north and I felt like a toy being pushed around by Mother Nature. The worst part was going up from Eluanbi to Longpan Park and the Fengchuisha, a wind blown sand formation, where I was weaving like a maniac praying that cars and scooters can avoid me in time (they did).
These photos don't do justice in showing how windy it is but just understand that I almost lost my phone many times trying to take these.
Eventually I headed a bit onto Route 200 which was a huge wind relief and finally the kind of roads I love to bike on, twisty and hills with just the right grade. I stopped in Manzhou for lunch and can you believe it, the last 7-11 for a while, where I met two other bike tourists (one of which I passed later amidst another round of the wind game when the road went back along the shore for a while) and a guy who was walking around Taiwan in the opposite direction as me. He told me a good campground in Xuhai which is probably where I'm going to go later. Conditions for the rest of the ride was more or less a repeat of the morning but I was more mentally prepared and mastered spinning in high gear both uphill and into the wind. The one thing I want to emphasize is that even with the ugly weather, the natural beauty of eastern Taiwan, which seems like the only remaining part of Taiwan yet to be vastly urbanized, shined through (sarcasm unintended) evidently. I arrived in Xuhai a bit around 4:30pm and decided to call it a day, finger crossed that the weather would be better, if only slightly, tomorrow. The biggest attraction here is the hot spring, which I'm still consider going in. Talking to the lady at the grocery store, pretty much the only place to get food here, I found out that Xuhai is home to about 300 permanent residents, which finally reminds me of home.
No comments:
Post a Comment