alishan

recently my friend peter asked me if i wanted to go to alishan with him. since i
have seen so little of the island i jumped at the chance. alishan is a mountain
just south of the middle of the island.(shan means mountain in chinese) to get
there we had to take a bus from taipei. peter warned me that i should dress
warmly. well, what he didn't warn me was that the mountain wouldn't be so
cold but the bus would! the air conditioning was on full blast the whole
trip. good thing i hadn't gotten caught in any rainstorms before i got on
the bus. our bus left sometime after 9pm on a saturday night and arrived
near 4 am on sunday morning. once we got off the bus we hiked up the uneven paths of stairs to
sunrise house to catch the sunrise. it was nice to be out
in the woods and see the mountains changing colours as
the sun rose. i wasn't expecting it to be so bright.
like having a giant flashlight shine in your eyes. i could
only glimpse at it, it was so bright (well, duh! it is the
sun!).i ended up getting a mild sunburn from it as well.
you'd think i would of experienced this before but due to
the clouds around taipei i don't really get much exposure
to direct sunlight like this. after the sunrise we hiked
around the paths taking picture sof the cherry blossoms
and the mountains. it's march so it is cherry blossom
time here. it felt great to walk in the woods again.

reminded me of camping trips when i was a child and i
kept thinking of california for some reason i can't quite
figure out why. maybe it was all those slide shows from
vacations i was too little to remember (or maybe i wasn't
even born yet)that still made an impression on me. still
it was great to be in the fresh air for a change and to
just wander around and take in the natural scenery.
around noon we had to head back to the bus. our bus
ride back took 9 hours. i think our bus driver got lost
around taichung as our ride back shouldn't of been 9
hours long. needless to say i was dead tired when we
got back. but quite happy to have had this little excursion out of the city.




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