Train back to Taipei

At Chiayi station, they changed the tickets for us (somehow they understood what we wanted) and we were now booked on the 1.13pm back to Taipei. We called the Wonstar hotel and booked a room. They didn’t have any regular rooms so we booked an executive room. The Wonstar doesn’t look like the kind of place that caters for executives, but there you go. More white bread egg-mayo sandwiches for the train plus some sushi rolls with god know what inside – it looked like crab, cheese and fried onion. We weren’t exactly eating well on this trip. The tea made up for it though, I bought a giant one to drink while we waited for our train. I remembered how to say “no sugar” in Chinese, but couldn’t remember how to say “no milk”. I did remember the Chinese symbol for it though, so I drew it on some paper and then put a line though it dramatically. The vendor understood and I came away with what I wanted.

Next to us on the train were two old people who made themselves right at home: shoes off and their belongings and lunch spread all around them. They were eating a bag of lychees and made sucking, snorting and spitting noises all the way to Taipei. This put me off (my already horrible) lunch. David went to the loo and walked in on an old lady who hadn’t bothered to lock the door. She was squatting above a western-style toilet. David was quite shaken by the experience.

As soon as we got going on the train, the weather improved. We couldn’t help but wonder whether it had also improved in the mountains…. Never mind, lots to do in Taipei.

Change of plans

It rained heavily all night long and was still thunderous when we went out at 8.30am. We talked to the man at Fancylake reception who was watching the news on TV. Images of flooded villages in southern Taiwan were being shown. The receptionist explained that the typhoon and this weather would be here at least for the next 3 or 4 days. So much for hiking in Taiwan. We thought we’d better head back to Taipei. There’s no point being in the countryside when there is foul weather, at least in the city there are lots of indoor things to do. As we checked out, we learned that all the trains and buses out of Fencihu had been cancelled due to landslides and debris blocking the paths. It was like Czesky Crumlov and the washout summer we had in the Czech Republic 2002 all over again. We had a bit of a washout trip in northern Vietnam also back in 2002 come to think of it. 2002 was a bad year for rain. We worried that we wouldn’t get back to the city. Fortunately, we met a taxi driver who would be willing to drive us back to Chiayi where we hoped we could change our train tickets and get back to Taipei as soon as we could.

Rainy night in Chiayi

I got a text message from Viv in Taipei telling me that rain was expected. She wasn’t kidding, it was lashing rain. Despite the weather, we went out for a walk down Jhongshan Road. There were lots of good shops but we (once again) didn’t find many good restaurants. The array of choices didn’t tempt me; deep fried street food, scruffy “turkey-rice” joints and The Golden Eagle British pub. There used to be a Golden Eagle near us when we lived in east London. We ended up in Mos Burger, the Japanese hamburger chain we visit at home from time to time for a treat. The Taiwanese version had enough regional variations to make the experience exotic. David ate his burger inside deep fried rice patties instead of a bread bun.

Catching the 2.10 to Chiyai

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.