Forte Dong Shan Villa Lotung

Yilan city is located in the Northeast corner of Taiwan. The drive from Taipei used to be time consuming and treacherous. However, once National Highway No. 5 opened up the drive time was reduced to about thirty minutes. The scenic beauty of this city has not been affected
by urban developers. As you are exiting the highway ...

We should have left a little earlier in the morning to get to Fulong Beach the train ride was an hour and a half. Most of the way there a gaggle of girls giggled and waved to Ryan, occasionally emitting phrases like: Hi!, Where you from? They finally worked up the courage to ask him if they could take a photo with him. Lucky for us they too were heading for Fulong Beach. What luck! It was very easy to find although we didn't see it when we got in to the train station. But there is basically ...

Ni Hau, bin heute in Taipei, der Hauptstadt Taiwans gelandet. Die Ausreise in den Philippinen war schmerzlos, wenn auch erneut lange Schlangen. In Taipei dann keine Schlangen und auch keine Probleme bei der Einreise (Deutsche brauchen kein Visum, Taiwan freut sich ueber jeden Besucht:-). Was sagt das Auswaertige Amt ueber Taiwan: Deutschland erkennt Taiwan nicht als selbständigen ...

... neck support things and a blackness-inducing eyemask, stirring only for meals and to watch Knocked Up on the little tv thingy with Mum. Aeroplane food was pretty decent too, including a yummy meal comprising a veggie and tofu stirfry with a side salad of cold sesame veggies plus a bread roll and Nuttelex, all topped off by a rice pudding! Not bad for an airline that had difficulties wrapping it's grey matter around the whole vegan thing :)

26 May I boarded the fast train for Taipei at noon - just as it started to pour down rain. The heat, the humidity - even the smell of the rain reminded me of my home town, Baton Rouge, at this time of year. Shortly after leaving Taichung the rain stopped. Almost the entire area along the two hour ride to Taipei was built up and highly urbanized. I guess there's no other way to cram 22 million people onto such a small island. I went back to my home in Taipei for a ...

Route: Wujie - Dongshan river park, Sea side - Wujie ( by bike ) Total Distance: 30 km by bike ( not counted in total ) Altitude: 0 Have my well-known great western breakfast on the terrace with music and the newspaper I just bought around the corner. The homestay provides bikes for their guests, so I take one and ride on a bikeway along Dongshan river down to ...

I suppose I could really drag this out by describing in detail each place I visited, but I'll just let the photos do what they do and say that I had a great time. I woke up and hopped on my scooter heading for Taroko national park. I lucked out on the weather (no rain) and cruised up the highway, music of the wicked witch from Wizard of Oz strangely playing in my head (it's a Jim Carey in Dumb and Dumber thing), well, that ...

Taipei: Architecture, Foot Massage, & Freedom of Assembly So, time in Formosa (Portugese - beautiful island) is at an end, and like crawling through the desert, the desert definitely sucks, but every sip of water has become an unparalleled delight. That's my metaphor of the moment I suppose for what it's been like here, as some days have been quite difficult. When it's ***********nect and to understand, those little moments where it does happen become really joyous ...

... so we do. Her friend and his daughter, Grace, arrive and walk with us to the bus station at the end of the airport. After a lot of what seems like unnecessary yelling in Mandarin, Alice turns to us and says it is too far and too dangerous for us two girls to go alone and she and Grace will take the day to give us a tour around Taipei (!) What?!?!? Without really knowing what is going on, Julie and I are piling into the back of a 1980s volvo, listening to a ...

In college while using the communal bathroom in the dorm, I had often scratched my head in puzzlement upon finding shoe prints on the toilet seat. What the heck? At times, I had also caught the heads of the Chinese girls who lived down the hall poking briefly out of the top of the stall like they were standing on something. These things started to make sense later, though, when I moved to Taiwan and began using public ...