the path we’d walked on! It really was a lovely area, and a far cry from the big city of Taipei!! The path from here led through two more bigger tunnels, called water curtain tunnels, but had been closed off due to being unsafe. This area had suffered pretty badly a few years ago in the 921 earthquake, a huge quake which rocked most of Taiwan. Not only is Taiwan on the Western edge of the Pacific ring of fire, and suffers numerous earthquakes, it is also frequently battered by Typhoons, the Asian equivalent of hurricanes. The combination of the two makes it a very difficult job keeping the infrastructure in this area intact!!!

After walking back into Tienhsiang we climbed over the bridge and up the steep steps to the Pagoda. It was pretty high up at the top, and again the wind was pretty strong, but the views down onto the 5 star hotel were quite mad, straight onto it’s rooftop swimming

pool, which strangely enough was unoccupied!!! We looked around the adjoining Buddhist temple, and noticed for the first time since Tibet that the temple contained three big Buddha statues instead of the one we’d been used to in Southeast Asia. There was a lady with a cart selling some food from a steaming pot, and we figured that any food sold in a Buddhist temple must be veggie, so thought we’d have a look. Hmmmm, the pot contained what can only be described as brick sized lumps of tofu in a slop-like soup, so we decided to give it a miss and stick to our pot noodles!!!

As it was now getting pretty cold, and we weren’t exactly thrilled at the prospect of another three nights in our refrigerated cell, we decided to go and check how much the five star hotel was as we’d heard that you could get some pretty good offers midweek out of season. Unfortunately the offer consisted of £20 off