October 30, Bad Surf. Instead 南澳/Nanao 爬山 Mountain climb

The surf was totally washed out around Suao yesterday, so one has to improvise in order not to waste the trip. This region, only about 70 minutes drive from Taipei during the week to me is one of such beauty. We went to Nanao to see what had happened to the river post the large major typhoon(name slips my mind) which occured about 2 months ago. The last time I was here was last year and this river and climb is totally un spoilt area with hot springs next to the river. There are few visitors and nobody really knows about it.

The website I like best to look at if the surf is bad and you want to remind yourself of how good the waves are in Taiwan MOST OF THE TIME is http://www.surftaiwan.com/. Surftaiwan is run by Neil (never met the bloke) but I suggest you just drool over the sight of the pics and you can easily tell what a great place Taiwan is to surf. Anyway enough of that, Nanao (see location) is a small town and the surrounding area has approximately 4k population of mainly local aborigines.

The whole riverbed (Pic 1) had being nearly doubled by the water flow from the Typhoon and the original road was totally washed out. We had to ditch the car and start the walk into the mountain much earlier that thought.

Huge boulders are a feature of this walk, similar to scenes from the Harry Potter movie series filmed in New Zealand, except here the film extra's if used would be Asian looking. The surrounding hills were covered in mist and low hanging clouds, that seemed to be stationary and waiting to reveal another landslide.

After walking for another half an hour in which we only ran into two local aborigines who passed us. Thy had informed us that the road would be rebuild alongside the riverbank, now that it has being widened. They were going to checkout a net that they had put upstream to catch local fresh prawns 3 days ago. Since it had started to rain, it was crucial they got there today as further rain forecast would wash it away. Those guys scooted ahead, leaving us white guys plodding along at a snails pace. It seemed they just bounced from rock to rock, chewing binglang(local delicacy) which you could say give you a little high.



The pic above shows a telegraph pole that once stood 5 metres to the right but had landed in the river bed. Several more were strewn along the river and yes, there were no live wires to zap us to death. Now that we were really heading into the river, with the rain lifting a few large snails had appeared, lounging on the road and trees.


These creatures just slid across the road and pathway, no obstacle could stop them. The weather by now was clearing and the seemed to be more birds coming out (sorry no pics. The rocks that had being unearthed after the rain had great textures on them and were smooth as silk.


The rain then started again and it was becoming very slippery climbing over the rocks and one wrong move and you would hit a rock and injure your back or hip. There are endless ways to describe this area and again the best reference would the Harry Potter scenes that all of the world has seen over the years.

For those of you wanting to know the facts and interesting trivia about Taiwan, I would recommend http://ozsoapbox.com/. Started about 4 years ago by Michael Thurton (never met him) it is a great treasure trove of information on all aspects of Taiwan.