Taiwan Roadtrip: Highway 9

We started out our Taiwan Roadtrip with a traintrip – a morning train from busy Taipei to the south eastern city of Taitung. Here we picked up our rental car, a cute little Nissan March (at home called Micra) and set out for Taitung Hongye Hot Springs, after getting a little bit lost in the beautiful, tall, green mountains we found it; it was closed. We went in anyway to take a look: It turned out half the place was buried in mud! The typhoon that had raged havoc over southern Taiwan just before we arrived had apparently passed by here. A tiny bit disappointed but mostly just shocked to see those buildings half buried, we drove on.
We headed for Loshan instead, where we checked into the free campsite. Yup completely free! Our little site came with a wooden platform, a bench/table and a parking lot for the car, other facilities included toilets (with toilet paper and soap) and showers and a cooking unit with sinks and light. We happily settled in!



Next morning we got up early and set off for the 120m high waterfall nearby. We walked around the forest area and found a nice viewing platform, from where there were beautiful views of the waterfall. The trail went by the same river, which was created by the waterfall, and we spotted a place where the river had formed a nice little pool. Being rather hot, we quickly jumped in and splashed around in the cool waters.



Not so far from the falls a sign marked a place where gas and mud leaked from underground, forming a small mud-volcano. It wasn’t much, but it was fun to see how the mud bubbled and the gas escaped. Apparently the gas can be used for burning, but we couldn’t find anything to help light fire to the bubbles. The aboriginals know how to harvest the gas and were probably some of the first people to use natural gas.



Then we headed to Sixty Stone Mountain; an area known for growing day-lilies. These orange flowers are used in cooking; dried, pickled or raw. The winding road to the top gave good views of the surrounding areas, and soon the hillsides were covered in orange and green. The flower fields were absolutely beautiful, and the mountain backdrop didn’t scar the eye either. Our little car braved the steep roads without any complaints. The area was so picturesque, that it could easily be the scene for the next Hobbiton.



Our last itinerary for the day was the Walami trail; a trail going deep into the mountains. We had just planned to walk for the first part of it, but again the Typhoon cheated us. The trail had been closed, as it had been too damaged by the winds and mostly the torrential rains. Luckily we could still get to the Nanan waterfall, which lies just before the trailhead. Again it was a beautiful setting and again we soon jumped into the clear, cool waters and took a swim, together with a few adventurous Taiwanese people. Martin went underneath the actual fall and got himself a hard shoulder massage – just what was needed after a lot of driving.

Varanasi

We arrived at Mughal Serai, a town 15km from Varanasi, at dusk – a hell hole bathed in magical light. A short but extremely bumpy auto rickshaw ride later we entered Varanasi. Our driver did his best to hustle as much money as possible from us; howerver we still made it away with most of our rupees.



A lot of little alleyways lead down to the Ganges and they are all too narrow for a rickshaw to enter, and since our hotel of choice were located at the edge of the Ganges at the end of a winding little alley, we embarked on a stumble through the dark, guided and mislead in turn by the locals. We found it alright after a few wrong turns though.
Our room has the tiniest balcony with a view down the ghats (the steeps leading down to the river) and the Ganges. One morning I awoke to see the sun rise and make the river glisten and shimmer like gold.



In the many narrow alleys of the old part of Varanasi, you are in constant danger of being trampled by a cow, pushed over by a man ferrying a load of bricks on his bicycle or someone on a motorbike blaring his horn - it is a great people watching place. There are always beautifully dressed women in gorgeous, colorful saris, cute schoolchildren, old men in lungis (like a sarong) and vendors selling everything from vegetables to CDs – all the hustle and bustle of India.
At first we thought it all a bit much, but eventually we started hearing how friendly most people sounded we they greeted a “Namaste!” There are many smiles and even the touts seem less persistent than we have otherwise experienced in India.



The Ganges is a multi-purpose river, it is used by the kids as a fun place to swim, women wash clothes, buffaloes are driven there to be watered and cooled and scores of boats ply up and down the coast. Many people perform “Puja” (prayer) while dipping their heads under - the water is believed to be very holy - while others shower nearby; soap all over the body, scrubbing away as they sit on the ghats. Along the these ghats, 60.000 people submerge themselves daily in the waters – along this same stretch 30 large sewers empty into the river. The water is so polluted that it has become septic, having 1.5 million faecal coliform bacteria per 100 ml of water – in healthy bathing water this figure should be less than 500! We limited our river activities to boating and dipping our feet…



Two of the Varanasi ghats are burning ghats, were cremations happen over open fire 24 hours a day. It is a bit macabre seeing a half burned leg being pushed further into the flames and to have smoke and ashes blow around you and into your eyes and mouth – knowing where it comes from…! But in a way it also seems perfectly natural; the Indian at least are very nonchalant about it. The men handling the bodies and fires on the burning ghats all belongs to one of the lowest castes in India. The owner of the burning ghats, also from this low caste, is now a very rich man from all the business he gets from the constant cremations. He has built a big house overlooking the Ganges, but he still uses leftover firewood from the cremation-fires for cooking.



The Hindus believe that if you are burned on the banks of the Ganges and have your ashes spread over the river you skip all that incarnation nonsense and jump straight to Nirvana – not bad eh?
Bodies are cremated with jewelry and all, so you see men and boys in the river looking like they are panning for gold and in a way you can say that they are…
Not all people can be cremated; unnatural deaths, which include small children, people with leprosy, pregnant women and people who have died from cobra bites, are instead weighted down by stones and thrown directly in the river.



Every evening at the main ghat the “Ganga Arti” is preformed, it is a prayer to Mother Ganges as a show of respect. The act involves a lot of fire and the air is thick with myra and incense, music and drumming and – my favorite part - tooting in big seashells. It is quite spectacular! Out over the water you can see a lot of small lights; little lotus flower lamps set alight as offerings to the Ganges.



Getting up at 5 am normally isn’t that fun, but taking an early morning boat trip on the Ganges, we were rewarded with soft golden light and all the color and clamber of pilgrims bathing and performing puja.

Traveling Sumatra

“You are eating Indonesian food?!?” “We thought foreigner only ate toast all day long!” This little scenario played out in a tiny warung somewhere in Sumatra where we duly sat eating very authentic local cuisine. A bunch of Indonesians were thoroughly amused and surprised by us “white people” sitting there eating their kind of food – and we even seemed to like it! Of course we liked it – Sumatra is renowned for its delicious, if a bit spicy, padang food.


Sumatra is one of the places in Indonesia that used to have loads of backpackers, but now after one catastrophe after another, Sumatra is well and truly off the beaten track. That just might be another good reason to visit… Other sound arguments for packing your backpack and start exploring Sumatra is the amazing nature that unfolds where ever you look, the chance to climb volcanoes, observe orangutans in their natural habitat (one of only two places left on earth where this is possible), kicking back on gorgeous beaches and incredible diving.



You don’t go to Sumatra for your regular sand’n’sun holiday – that would be Bali. Sumatra is adventure, experiences and challenges of the kind that needs the stamina to live through long, extremely bumpy bus rides, a small compact backpack and sensible shoes.



We went with way too much luggage including a laptop, the most sensible shoes I was carrying was a pair of kawasakis (which is a perfectly good pair of shoes, however they are not made for jungle trekking on muddy slopes in the Sumatran tropical forest – especially not since they were a light shade of yellow…). And as for the long, bumpy bus rides – we did do a few, but for the longest one (would have been at least 13 hours) we opted for a cheap flight instead. Still we had an amazing trip! In little under 3 weeks we tried to breathe through all the smog in Medan; Sumatra biggest city, we swam in Southeast Asias largest lake; Danau Toba, we jungle trekked and saw orangtuans in Bukit Lawang and hung out at the lovely beaches with the locals at Pulau Weh. You’d be hard pressed to squeeze much more in as getting from one place to another is a very time consuming affair in Sumatra. The beauty of that however means that there is still loads of things for us to see next time we venture to Sumatra :-)


Straddled by equator Sumatra is nearly 2000km long, stretching from Banda Aceh in the north to Bakauheni in the south, as slightly smaller than France. Sumatra is the proud owner of nearly 100 volcanoes, 15 of them still active and the tallest one being 3805 meters tall. In the jungles of Sumatra you may be so lucky to discover Rafflesia arnoldii; the world’s largest flower. You might also bump into the endangered Sumatran rhino, elephants and Sumatrans tigers. However the main attraction is the orangutan, they can be found in Gunung Leuser National Park – 5000 wild orangutans are believed to still roam the park.

Silk Road Cities

Greetings from Uzbekistan! We have visited the Silk Road cities of Samarkand and Bukhara with their many magnificent medrassas (Islamic schools) and mosques, all beautifully decorated with exotic blue mosaics and turquoise domes. One afternoon we sat at a rooftop restaurant in Bukhara enjoying the view out over one of these striking buildings, watching the light slowly change with the day, witnessing the blue colors of the domes and the intricate tile work morph in the golden light. Children were playing in the plaza in front of us and an old woman was selling huge, juicy watermelons next to the souvenir stalls. A nice peaceful moment to take it all in.



Later in the afternoon the temperature has also dropped to the bearable in Bukhara, it could by now almost be described as comfortable – especially when thinking back to the previous day where we had undertaken a 7 hour train ride with no air-con. In the carriage it must have been at least 35 degrees, and only a hot, lazy wind swept down the corridor, barely making itself felt by the profoundly sweating passengers, us included. To distract us from the heat a Russian TV series, episode 1-29, were put on the small TV hanging from the ceiling of the carriage. It was no easy feat to make out the plot, but is seems to revolve around some dirty cops who did a lot of shooting… Everyone else in the carriage however, from grannies to 5 year old seemed pretty engaged in the series, was this something the everyday people of Uzbekistan could relate to? Corrupt police officers are extremely common in all of Central Asia, apparently this is most easily experienced in the Tashkent metro. Travelers’ wisps ghastly stories about being shaken down for a bribe by crooked police men who will escort you into small rooms to “count” your money, unavoidably some of them disappear during the counting. Lonely Planet, the modern day travel bible, happily joins in on these scary accounts with good advice on how to best avoid the run-ins, or at least endure least possible loss. However the metro being super handy for getting around Tashkent (it is too hot to walk around) we still ride it. Avoiding all eye contact with the many police officers in the metro while trying to look as local as possible we still await that rueful encounter. A couple of times we get to leave, giddy with the feeling of having “just escaped” as we pass the last police man upon exiting the metro and ascending back up to the baking hot streets of Tashkent. However one day we are stopped by a couple of police officers! But after a short chat about Danish football they let us go, maybe the situation isn’t as bad as most people make it out to be? Or maybe we just got lucky! :-)



We also visited a fairground in Bukhara, Russian style! The rides were all old and rusty, and we dared not go near the ferries wheel, as it looked especially rambling. The merry-go-around was of cause propeller driven but it was kinda fun ;) Safety wasn't prioritized, but who cares in Central Asia?



Samarqand was an incredible city, retaining both a Persian and Soviet charm - yes, the Soviet influence actually had some charm. Broad boulevards, wooden houses, medrassas, churches, mosques and markets; it was almost as magical as the name sounds. The Registan, Gur-Emir and Afrosiab were all breathtakingly beautiful with a deep blue sky as backdrop.



We stayed at a great guesthouse with a fabulous garden and great breakfast, with homemade jam en masse. It was located very close to the Gur-Emir Mausoleum, down a small alley in a small residential area - it wasn't as cheap as we normally opt for, but it was value for money!

Bishkek, the Capital of Kyrgyzstan

When waiting for our departure into China, we spend a couple of days in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. Unlike in Uzbekistan where all obvious memorabilias of the Communists have been demolished, quite a few Lenin statues are found around in the squares of the Kyrgyz main city.



Bishkek was a pleasant stop-over: small, leafy and with good dining options. The broad lanes are relatively quiet and there are many old houses and remnants from the soviet days. We got "lucky" finding accommodation, as it is really scarce on the budget level. Only drawback was one of our Japanese dorm-mates tendency to snore louder than a saw-mill. The guesthouse was called Sakura's guesthouse and is featured in the Lonely Planet - it was quite full at all times it seems, as it is one of the better options at budget prize.



As in Uzbekistan, the travellers you meet here are definitely not the gap-year-khao-san-road type; many are long time travelers, with very different backgrounds, nationality and age, each with whom you can share experiences from past shared destinations and whom can lure you into a change of travel-plans with good advice or tales of unheard of places.

Brahmin blue streets

On our tour through Rajasthan we had now come upon Bundi, a smaller less touristy town, which might owe its relative lack of tourism to the bad roads leading to it and the shortcoming of decent train connections. We spend the days walking the narrow Brahmin-blue lanes stopping to look at the bazaar, temples and old havelis along the way.



Looming over the city is the Taragarh Fort, it was build in 1354 and has been long abandoned. It is now partly overgrown with wines and a band of monkeys have pretty much taken over - we were advised to find a big stick up there to scare them away. As we were exploring, we were suddenly caught between two monkeys screaming at each other, chasing each other around. We were completely caught off guard and got a little startled; Martin found a bigger stick – with thorns on it, and we proceeded. There were some huge reservoirs and in some places, and we could still see old, fading murals adorning the walls.



Another highlight was the Bundi Palace; it had previously been shut up and left to the bats but has now been cleaned up and is open to the public. It was a pretty grand place, with decaying murals and pretty ornament balconies; we walked through most of it, enjoying the view over the city through the many windows. In some of the rooms you could still clearly smell the bats, and in a couple of darker passages, hundreds of them were clinging to the high ceilings.