Taiwan Tea Guy

We recently had a 3-day weekend here in Taiwan for the ‘Double Ten’ (Oct. 10th) celebration of the ROC national day, the equivalent of the US 4th of July. A friend of mine, Billy, is a well-known 4×4 driver and Landrover mechanic, and he invited me to join their Landrover Club for a camping holiday in central Nantou.

When I asked if he had room for my family and I, he replied, “Well, do you want to drive the Discovery or the Defender?” It wasn’t a hard question to answer!  I hadn’t been camping in Taiwan for several years, and still miss my off-roading days of yore. I signed on for the Defender 110, and the preparations began. I ended up bringing Aliang and his boy along as well, so we had 5 in our car total. We left Taipei in a 3 vehicle convoy, but added a couple more Landrovers on the way down (friends of Billy’s).

The trip down took us through Miaoli county, and we stopped at a temple near Shr Tan, which is where Aaron likes to go for high-quality spring water. We also rested for awhile at Ming De Reservoir, a popular hiking & fishing area near Miaoli City. The weather was very nice, and it was great to be out in the hills again. As you can see from the photos, Taiwan is a very lush and green country once you get away from the concrete jungle.

After topping up the tanks on our way through Nantou, we finally headed up into the mountains in the late afternoon. Part of the main road was flooded out during the typhoons we had this year, so we had to detour up over a mountain on a steep 1-lane farm road, pulling off at one point to wait about 15 minutes for traffic coming up the other side to clear before we could go down. 

Other than a few recently-cleared rockslides, the rest of the drive in was fairly uneventful. We arrived at the camp with just enough time to get our tents set up before nightfall, and then fixed some dinner.  There was a big crowd at the camp - over 100 Landrover vehicles were there, plus other campers as well - so it was a bit noisy, but things settled down by 11pm. I ended up sitting out with a British friend, Larry, who was visiting Billy in Taiwan and came along with us, drinking tea and chatting until about 3am.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 at 1:40 pm and is filed under Life in Taiwan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.