30 March 2017
Ropes and ladders
Day trip to hike Wuliaojian
Its my last full day in Taiwan, so its time for one last mountain! According to most people, its the greatest mountain possible to climb in a day trip from Taipei. Super excited I was.
Apparently the other name for this place is divorce mountain, because many wives have left their husbands because they took them here. Such is the reputation for the strenuous adventure causing divorces, guys who want to get a divorce now bring their wives here hoping they will get angry enough to want a divorce. Or mabye its a good place to make it look like an accident?
Some people say, to go to and from Wuliaojian in a single day using public transport and climb the long route is impossible. They are partially correct! There was no bus back for 3 hours, so as predicted last night, I had a long walk after completing the climb and descent.
That was ok with me, I am quite fond of walking.
However even getting there was confusing enough, first the easy part, the subway, then a bus to Sanxia, then another bus to the trail head.
There are lots of buses to Sanxia, I just got on any old bus that said that on the sign, turns out Sanxia is a big place, and it went nowhere near where the next bus departs from.
So I went from being nearly an hour early to only making my connecting bus by 10 minuntes.
No one got off at the hiking trail stop except me, but I was sure I was in the right place because there were about a hundred cars and scooters just abandoned at a random spot on the side of the road, and a small shop selling water and white gardening gloves.
Gloves were absolutely mandatory today, thankfully I always travel to hikes with gloves.
It was surprisingly busy, and very awesome. I want to go again. I dont think the photos will be great, because -
1. Pollution
2. I bumped my camera and switched settings and didnt notice for a while
3. Hard to take photos hanging from a rope!
Now I need to scrub my boots and remove all the mud, sweat and sunscreen from myself. When I arrived back at the hotel just now the reception girls were very concerned and asked if I needed a doctor, I think they assumed I had been in a fight, so it must have been a great day!
On a sad note, thats it, no more mountains, tomorrow afternoon I start the long trip home.
Todays breakfast, quite good again, featuring turnip cake. But tomorrows Chinese option is congee, so I will be back to a hot dog and chips. I might try and sneak out to a cafe without getting ushered into the breakfast room.
Sanxia city, where the hell is my bus stop?
There is a very busy local market, but I cant find the bus stop,
Luckily I found the bus stop, and got off at the right spot. Here is the shop selling white gloves, water, boiled eggs, and little tomatoes.
Immediately, ropes, up a cliff. Excellent.
You go near vertical for a few hundred metres, thats the road below.
More good ropes.
And still more ropes. Where the rope had frayed you can see there is actually wire inside.
A bit of a view back to Sanxia, and some powerlines.
More ropes and other people. They take it very slowly and are rugged up in winter jackets. Its near 30 degrees!
This is the top of the first part of the trail, theres another way down from here, but then its only about 1/4 of the way to the top, the real fun is just beginning!
Lots more ropes and cliffs to fall off, and people I need to get past. They were all very chatty today, I think there was at least one group of people all from the same company doing a bonding day.
The view back towards Taipei.
And the polluted view up the valley, towards Taoyuan where there airport is. If I had of bought my suitcase up the mountain I could of just kept going.
The formerly dangerous ridge walk is about to start. Its not dangerous anymore because a rope has been installed the whole way. I was kind of grateful.
This goes on for hundreds of metres, it was fantastic.
Selfie number one.
A bit more rope assisted ridge walk.
As you go over each mini peak there are more ropes to climb or scramble down. I guess if you let go of the rope you would hurt yourself badly, but I decided to not do that, and therefore I dont think it was particularly dangerous.
There are a couple of more challenging cliff faces, at one of them there was a young guy with two teenage girls, and the girls were falling, and laughing about it. Eventually I helped hoist them up to the rope, then climbed past them, them pulled the rope up, then repeated that with the other one.
They giggled the whole time.
The very last bit is ladders. I dont know why, I found these to be more dangerous than the ropes. The ladders were hanging from metal stakes you might get impaled on drilled into the rocks.
The view from the top, high pollution. It is not a hike about getting to a high altitude, its a hike where you enjoy pulling yourself up and lowering yourself down, for hours.
Good enough day to warrant a second selfie. I was sweating a lot.
The summit area is nothing special, but others were holding up signs they had printed. I assume this spot is on a list of 10 places every hiker must conquer, and you wont believe what happened next!
There is a much longer way down, and its highly encouraged to go that way so you dont double back and make people wait to climb up all the ropes, so I went that way. It was a far less technical path.
These cables are to haul construction equipment up to make the bases for the big power poles. So perhaps thats how they make the temples in the mountains? The top and bottom station of the construction cable car thing looked very temporary.
Nearly back down now.
I was looking for my bus to go past. Problem is I had no idea when it might come. Still I felt the need to go as fast as I could to reduce the chance of missing a phantom bus. All to no avail.
The long walk back to Sanxia featured this guy fishing in amongst the huge factories.
Factories included Foxconn. Their offices looked very modern, I dont think anything was being manufactured here, there were no suicide nets.
Once I got back onto the subway, I realised how filthy I was, and covered in scratches. A sure sign that a great day was had.
I was so dirty that no one sat near me on the subway.
And then as I arrived back at my hotel, parade time again! It seems all the streets are blocked for competing parades, heres one with a hello kitty speaker system car blasting out the latest pop hits as grandmas beat drums and offer prayers.
There are also hundreds of these giants wandering around in the middle of the road. I have no idea why but its causing traffic chaos. At least they arent burning anything.