cember

We were up pretty early to catch our train., which was perfectly on time, and actually quite plush - I was initially disappointed to find that we would be going backwards, before being introduced to the pedal underneath the seats which you press and the seats spin round!!! No more going backwards - ever!! Hurray! (It’s one of my pet hates going backwards on trains!!). We caught our first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean about an hour out of Taipei, I guess we’ll be getting very familiar with this particular pond over the next year, and will be seeing it from three different sides!!! The journey was really quite impressive, with the Ocean on one side, and some pretty big looking mountains and cliffs on the other. We couldn’t tell quite how big the mountains were as it was quite cloudy and dull, but hey, you can’t have everything!!!!

We got on the bus with not too much hassle, and the bus journey up to Tienhsiang was quite stunning - the road seemed to cling onto the sides of the gorge, just!! The journey took about an hour and a half, and we arrived at our hostel at around 3pm. We pretty soon discovered why the place was so cheap. The room was very small, draughty, unheated and finished in a disgustingly patterned formica!! It was certainly near the bottom of the list of nice places we’ve stayed. And as Tienhsiang was quite high up, it was actually pretty chilly, so we figured that the outlook would look better with a cup-a-soup and a cheese sandwich!! That was the next thing to go wrong! When we plugged our cup water boiler in it at first appeared that it wasn’t working - but then Hel noticed that it was actually warm. After a quick look at our guidebook I spotted that the electricity was only 100V, and the heater was designed for 240. The result being that it took about half an hour to heat up water to nearly boiling