Crossing the Tropic of Cancer on Bicycle all the way to Green Island...

I had one of the best short trips ever with 4 of my friends. We biked from Hualian on the east coast down route 11 to Taitung over three days. We took the train to Hualian early in the morning, the ride took 3 hours to reach the city. Two of us rented bicycles from Giant through their stores. You can rent at one location and return to another, you just have to let them know where. I took a taxi from the station to the bike shop that was in Hotel Palisades. It was 1000 NTD for 4 days (which is about $32 USD). They supplied me with a tool with all of the allen wrenches and others I would need, an air pump, a lock, saddle bags, an odometer, and lights. I decided that it would be a good idea to purchase bicycle shorts (which was a wonderful decision, I don't think my arse would have been able to take it without them). 

The first day we biked only around 50 km, and ended up sleeping in Jici. One of our friend's bike broke down, he broke a Bering. I suppose you really get what you pay for when you get a bicycle. I would highly recommend that people have a nice bike when trying to bike up mountains. Jici has black sand beaches, and it was my first time ever seeing such beaches. We could not find food, and wanted to get off of the 2-lane highway as quick as we could. A small convenience store was selling soups and snacks, we purchased soup and other food to fill up for the night. The girl working had lived in Saudi Arabia for a couple years and 3 of the guys on the trip are from the Middle East, and spoke Arabic. At this point, my Chinese is pretty limited, but out of the group I was able to communicate pretty well. We are all actually in the same language course, but my language exchanges are really paying off. After our meal, we made our way to the beach and found a shelter. We carried our bikes up to the second level and set up camp. Two people did not have sleeping bags, which made it a cold night for them, but we managed to get some sleep in between the coast guards checks on the beach (they kept flashing a light down the beach to make sure no one was swimming). We watched the sun rise and spent a couple hours napping on the beach, then made our way down highway 11. 

Zao fan means breakfast, but when you ask in poor pronunciation to someone who has a very thick Taiwanese accent, they think you mean chou fan which means fried rice. You can probbaly figure out that we had fried rice for breakfast :). We were wondering why they didn't ask us what we wanted, I figured it was family style and they would bring us whatever they had for that day. By the end of the day we had met back up with our friend 10km or so north of the Tropic of Cancer. I crossed the Tropic of Cancer for the first time and on bicycle to boot! The weather was really hot and we took a long break around noon to stay out of the sun for a little while, including a trip to a bat cave. I was expecting a really spectacular cave, but it was a tiny tiny cave with a boat that took a whole 10 minutes to visit (we fell for a tourist trap, at least it was cooler in the cave). By night fall we were hungry again and ate at a restaurant that looked extremely popular in Changbin. The food was awesome, and another patron helped us order the food in Chinese (would have taken me 30 minutes to figure it out, there was of course no English menu). After the meal we decided to find a spot to camp for the night and headed down by the water. The coast guards stopped us and asked what we were doing. One spoke pretty decent English and I kept asking nali shui jiao? women keyi nali shui jiao? They kept saying hotels and that it was took late. I told them we needed just a small shelter like the one on the hill above their building, and they said they didn't know and we should go back to town. Then I pointed at the garage and said something like that, do you know where? They said that we could stay in their garage :). So of course we couldn't refuse. They even brought blankets for the two that did not have sleeping bags, water to wash up, and breakfast the next morning. It was completely awesome.

So this is the last day of our bicycling to Taitung. We had biked 50 km the first day, 70 km the second day, and Sunday we would end up biking just shy of 8o km. We got the idea around lunch that we would just bike the whole way to Taitung and try to make the ferry to Green Island. I figured that this would be my only real chance to make it to Green Island. So we really worked hard to get to Taitung at a decent hour. We reached the central part of town and were in a 7-Eleven at 3:10 pm when the manager told us that the last ferry was at 3:30 pm. So we decided to try and make it. The manager said that it was past the 2nd 7-Eleven, take a right and follow the road to the water. Little did we know that the 2nd 7-Eleven was 5 km down the road! People tend to use Family Marts and 7-Elevens as landmarks to give directions, it often ends up being the most accurate, you do not have problems with pronunciation of Chinese words. I was determined not to give up and biked the 5 km in 15 minutes after already biking 75 km that day in blazing heat. I was the first to arrive at the port and ran to the ticket counter saying please wait in Chinese, now my friends come here. We want to go Green Island. They waited and we managed to catch it. I was full of adrenalin and did not think we could make it, but I was not going to give up half way there. After the 1 hour long ferry ride we made it to Green Island.

Green Island was a prison from 1950 to the 1980s for Chiang Kai Shek's political prisoners. The island is in the middle of a warm current coming up from the Philippines and Micronesia. The remnants of volcanic activity is very apparent in all of the rocks and terrain. We ate dinner and went to the information center. We gave up on trying to camp through the information center, and decided we would be better off trying to figure it out later. We biked 6 km to one of the three hot seawater springs in the world. We paid the 200 NTD entrance and took a much needed shower after 3 days of biking. We spent a bit of time in the hot springs and I was quite tired and laid down. I woke up in the morning on the beach chair and my friends were sleeping on the ones next to me. They didn't kick us out, I was certain that they would. We literally spent 12 hours at a hot spring, hah. After relaxing for a bit of time and watching the sun rise sitting in a hot spring on the beach, we decided to bike the other way around the island. The first 3 km were all up hill, so hard in 30 degree Celsius weather. We ate again, saw the really pretty views of the island (reminds me of Capri off the coast of Naples), and headed back on the ferry to Taitung. Ricardo and I returned the bikes, caught a taxi and the 5:30 pm train to Taipei. Home by 11 pm. What a great trip :). Now I have to catch up a little on work, but I am happy that I did not have to miss any courses or school for the trip :). I will upload pictures in another post.