We had tickets on the 2.10 train to Chiayi. Lunch hadn’t been a great success (greasy offal soup near the market) and I was still hungry. We weren’t going from the main station so pickings were slim on the food front. I bought some white bread egg mayonnaise sandwiches in a 7-11, some crisps and some Korean treats called “Choco Pie” which are basically Wagon Wheels (nostalgia!). The concourse was enormous, but it turned out that there were only 2 platforms. Our train rolled in dead on time and off we went heading south for 3 hours and 20 minutes. The route was pretty built up all the way. Part of it reminded us of central Japan with its rice fields, country houses and mountains in the distance. We don’t have palm trees in central Japan however. It’s more tropical in Taiwan.
We arrived in Chiayi 15 minutes after the tourist information office had closed for the day. Bummer. We had nowhere to stay and only a terrible map in the Rough Guide to go on. “Just pretend we are backpacking again” said David. Um… not difficult, we are carrying backpacks, we have just got off a train in a town we hadn’t heard of until a day ago, we’re wandering around in the rain and have nowhere to stay… where does the pretending part come in? I think what he meant was to pretend we don’t know what it’s like to stay at Le Meridien and be picked up by drivers and upgraded to business class and so on. I certainly had less to blog about when we enjoyed the 5 star life in Bali. We passed 2 or 3 grim looking hotels with cheesy, kitsch lobbies. One called “Hotel Country” didn’t look too bad so we wandered in to see if they had any vacancies. We were in luck! Soon afterwards we were installed into room 812 lounging on our 2 mattresses made up with clean sheets watching satellite TV. I never did that when I was a real backpacker.
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