4th day at Taiwan: Alishan 阿里山國家風景區

We arranged with 高山青大飯店 a bus tour for sunrise, and we did a stop-over in many interesting locations. Early in the morning when we crept out of bed and waiting at a reception, we heard a loud Americanised accent "It's so damn early", to which another voice replied "Don't be so dramatic". Half expecting a kirin to appear (the one making a comment about being early), we instead saw two girls coming down.

We later learnt that the girls had met while studying in the States, and the kirin like voice was from Yokohama. She understood no Mandarin and relied on her friend and her friend's family members to translate. Along the way, exlamations like "Oh my God!" spewed forth her mouth whenever she saw frost, a sea of clouds, etc etc that led me and SL LLG to believe she definitely isn't doing a geography major, or have done any form of geography in schools for that matter.

The coach driver spoke Hokkien (閩南語) most of the time, and while I have belittled SL LLG's knowledge of this dialect, all this condescendence evaporated when he was to my great amazament, explained to me how he heard the guide explaining that there was a particular tree that was touted to be 2000 years old officially, was actually 4000 years as this tree was wrapped around by the 2000 year old tree. Thus the 4000 year old tree was trapped inside.





One of the stops we made was to view the Couple Tree (夫妻樹). The sun-rising watching exercise was almost a ritual to all. We did not really expected it to be such as eye opener. If you do not believe what the fuss is all about, I suggest you watch this video in youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFYFG4qAHKg

I could not upload the video I took, so that is the best you can get.

After that, we had breakfast as arranged by the hotel. We wandered around and took some pictures. After that, we went to Seven Eleven to buy some beef instant noodles and coffee. We decided to have that as our pre-sunrise breakfast. Night fell and we had our steamboat dinner at this restaurant to the left:




Climbing up, you will get to the train station.



We ordered bamboo shoots and roasted boar meat as side dishes. Very oishii!

Asia's tallest Starbucks to imbibe in coffee. What could be more carefree than just sitting there, chatting and talking. But we were quick to remind ourselves that whatever we gossip, the gods are nearer to us now that we were higher in the mountains, so we had better cut some slack in what we say!



Seems like the only clients coming here are likely to be Singaporean. Where we were seated, across the table, some Singaporeans populating it were spouting pidgin Chinese-Eng with our own beloved accent