9/04/10 Taiwan’s National Treasure

Today’s destination was Taroko National Park.  Technically, it’s part of the highway system that cuts through the mountain range, but it’s so much more than that.  To try and describe it would expose my writing skills as deficient; in a word, it’s breathtaking.

Park Entrance



Driving through and stopping every now and then revealed a dichotomy in me: would I rather cruise though peacefully and appreciate the wonders of nature or would I prefer to tear up the mountain roads on a serious sportbike?  Nature lover or speed demon?  It’s a difficult choice, but the answer must be a bit of both.  Racing up and down these roads without first taking the time to appreciate the magnificence of the surroundings would be suicide mission.  You’d be mid corner and catch a glimpse of a waterfall which would no doubt send you straight into a guardrail, over a cliff and on to certain death.  Certain death in a dramatic setting and fashion, but death nonetheless.  Better to leave myself in Space’s hands.

All around you are signs advising you to watch for falling rocks; a strange warning considering that if you spend your time looking for falling rocks, you’ll most certainly end up in the guardrail.  See paragraph above for notes on certain yet dramatic death.  Better to appreciate the scenery and leave the rest to chance.

50 cent hard hats for 50 cent heads

A few people are killed by falling rocks each year, so it’s not an impossibility; the threat is real.  We turned around on one road to find fallen rocks where there had been none just a few minutes earlier.  On occasion, a Chinese national will be the victim of a falling rock.  This type of chance occurrence does not go unnoticed by the mainland and causes tensions between Taiwan and China because China doesn’t like Chinese citizens to be killed anywhere but in China.  I may offer a suggestion to have Chinese tourists who are merely injured while travelling abroad to be sent home for “finishing”.  Think of the ominous voice that comes from the skies in Mortal Kombat when someone is next to dead on their life force meter… “Finish Him!”

Photographing the park was a challenge.  How do you photograph a rock face about a kilometre high and still capture any detail?  The lines on the marble, the smoothness of the lower gorge that had been polished by the flow of the river and time; lots and lots of time.  I’ll let the photos speak for themselves.

The name Taroko means “magnificent and beautiful”.  The story of how the area got its name is a strange one.  It is said that an aboriginal who had spent his entire life in the mountains ventured down towards the base.  After catching a glimpse of the ocean he shouted “taroko”.  Oddly, this means that a park consisting of impressive mountains rivers and waterfalls is actually named for the beauty of the ocean…backwards!

We had gone as far up the mountain as time would allow and on our descent we stopped so I could take some photos of a mountain farmer tending to his crops.  The zoom lens revealed that he was spraying them with chemicals; hardly the portrait of traditional mountain farming (whatever that is) that I hoped to capture.  It was then that I heard a familiar noise from the trees across the road…macaques!  There was a small family of them.  The shy ones stayed higher in the canopy, while the alpha male came closer to investigate.  Space told me that I was twice lucky to have seen them since they are notoriously shy and difficult to spot.  He stuck around for a few minutes and I snapped off pics non-stop in the hope that I would get a winner; photographers are in constant search of “the shot”, sometimes it never comes.

My short visit to Taroko was impressive, we’d be back.