Went a trip to Wulai some days ago. The was wednesday, but now it's already sunday. I'm so busy by the time I never get the time to carve my experiences down appareantly. They've stockpiled a bit, really.
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If you go there from Taipei, which most people who read English will, you'll drive through a beautiful landscape. I have reason to believe that you will see just as beautiful - or even more - of a landscape if come from some other direction, because Wulai is certainly a very well preserved natural area.
It's known to be the home region of many Taiwanese Aboriginees, which you can easily see on the aborigine-style decorations standing everywhere you go. The Taiwanese Aboriginees are some quite interesting people actually. They're suspected to be the origin of mostly all other aboriginee tribes around the world as historians hypothesize that during the ice age, many people wandered from Taiwan to New Zealand, America and many other islands eastwards from Taiwan. Also, they are known to practice Catholicism and witchcraft. Yeah. Catholic Aboriginees. I'll hopefully get to write more about those in the future.
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Of course there be mountains. Two thirds of Taiwan is mountains. How else do you think they can manage to be an East Asian country and still have a reputation for such beauty?
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Now, actually we were invited here by Joni's rotary club. They had rented a kind of hot-spring hotel of some sort - just for holding a party and be able to bathe a bit. At this place we were served snack-like food for the whole day. Then people could freely go out and see the area, come back and refill, maybe take a hot bath and sing some karaoke as they liked.
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If you go to Wulai, be sure to pick up some of the local foods - like this fried fish. It's not just the standard Chinese-style deepfry.
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Also has shrimps like this. They're both very crispy and dry, but taste quite good.
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That's a pigeon or two there. Just chop it in random pieces, remove the head and legs and fry it. That's the standard way to cut a bird. Better get used yourselves to lots of bones.
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They had this tiny passenger train there to bring people around to the scenic spots. Earlier the tracks were used for transporting rocks from the mines that were here earlier. The train driver probably never saw a brazilian before.
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This is what met our eyes when we got off from the train. Joni promised to take me here again in the summer and then use the gondola to get to a really great swimming pool somewhere up there. One should be able to bathe in the forest apparently.
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That's hot spring water down there. You can tell by the color and the fact that no plants or fish can live in it.
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Jade. Can be found pretty much anywhere in Taiwan, but this one store I found here really had a lot of it. Seems a lot of shops like this were around actually.
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They seem to be more focused on weaving than selling jade here though. They have an unique way of making patterns in the clothe around here, probably from the aboriginee culture (let me just check up on that later on), so they sell a lot of carpets and bags, mostly for the Japanese tourists around here.
Because of special connections, I got a bag for myself for just about 1000 NT$ where the actual price was a little more than 3000 NT$. I'm going to flaunt that for those guccibag loosers when I get back to Denmark.
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Traditional aboriginee clothes it has to be. Now, I'm not so good at reading peoples ancestries so I can't tell how much Original Taiwanese genes are left in these guys, but they sure look like Wulaians.
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The shop had this really enormous Jade sculpture outside. I wonder how much worth that one must be. Sure must have taken a pretty big piece of Jade to carve.
Now, I'm going to finish writing for today. In the next post I will cover some more.