We spent the last three days on our bicycles down in Taroko Gorge and the northern part of the East Rift Valley. We had wanted to go all the way down to Taidong, but when Tim made the arrangements before the Lunar New Year, train tickets from Taidong back to Taipei were not available. Instead, he bought tickets to Xincheng (新城) and back to Taipei from Hualian.
As always,the first thing we did was to take the bike bags to the nearast 7-11 and send them off to another 7-11 close to the end stop, the Hualian railway station, since that would cut a couple of kilos off the weight for the next three days. The longer you stay in Taiwan, the more you come to understand that 7-11 is essential to a comfortable life.
That still gave us the always pleasant ride up Taroko Gorge to Tianxiang (天祥) and an afternoon excursion into the Baiyang Trail (白楊步道). As always, we spent the night at the hostel belonging to the Catholic church there, and as always, the beds were hard, hard, hard.
The second day we were planning on doing county road 193 down to Ruisui (瑞穗) for a hot spring bath at the end of a 130km ride. The day started fine but when we stopped at the 7-11 at the entrance to Taroko for breakfast, it started raining, and it didn’t let up for the rest of the day. We decided to ignore the 193 for the day and head down the 9 to get to Ruisui as soon as possible. Hopefully, the weather would be better on the third day.
And it was. A mostly overcast day and around 20-22 degrees C made for an almost perfect ride along the 193 back into Hualian. Doing the reservations before the holiday, it had only been possible to get us back too Taipei on the new Puyuma train at 10pm. We rode into town at 3pm, and didn’t really feel like spending the rest of the day in Hualian, so D went to see if there had been any cancellations so we could get tickets on an earlier train, and by 4pm, we were on the train back to Taipei.
Everything went smoothly, apart from a couple of flats, of course on the back wheel, once for D and once for Peter. Always the back wheel. I also had a back flat, but that was less than a kilometer from the train station in Hualian, so I pumped it up and that was enough to take me to the station.
We had smaller panniers on our bikes, but they aren’t water proof which is a pain when it rains. It was also a bit big for a three day ride, because when I’ve got space, I tend to stuff things in there. The only thing I didn’t pack this time was my camera. All these photos are taken with the (crappy) camera in my HTC phone. For the next 2-3 day ride, I’m getting a smaller bag that I can put on the detachable rack we have, just big enough to hold a change of clothes and some energy boosting snacks.