Alishan

I met Eva at 5:30 and we headed to Taipei main station to catch our train to Jiayi.  We stood for 3.5 hours, and it was pretty miserable.  Once it cleared out a bit I was able to sit down on the ground and sleep a little.  We got to Jiayi around 10:00 and met our friends Sarah, Austin, and Nathan.  We grabbed some food at the nearby market, since Eva and I hadn't eaten.  At the hostel, we prepared to sleep for two hours, as we were getting up at 2:00am to go to Alishan and seen the sunrise.  We grabbed breakfast at 7-11 and then met some other NTU exchange students who had just arrived, and our private driver, Ming.  He drove us to Alishan, about two hours away, driving like a maniac through the pitch black and fog.  He was very helpful though, taking us into the park in such a way that we didn't have to pay the entrance fee, and then taking us to the most popular spots.  Unfortunately, it was too cloudy to properly see the sunrise, but the sea of clouds nestled in the mountains was beautiful.

After a lot of stopping, pictures, and some hostile Formosan Macaques, we ended up at the Forest Railway station.  We had lunch/breakfast/whatever at a small shop before deciding to take the train to the cherry blossom area.  The blossoms were beautiful, but I'm not Asian, so I don't quite grasp the obsession with them.  Austin and I ended up falling asleep on a marble wall while the others walked around some more.  So naturally we got very sunburned. Back at the forest station, we still had a lot of time to kill, so we took another train to see some old trees.  It required hiking up a lot of -you guessed it- stairs, and since we were all so sleep deprived, we didn't make it very far.  Some mainlanders took interest in us and we chatted with them for a little bit on the trail.  Back at the station we ate again and waited for Ming to come pick us up.  He drove us all the way back to Jiayi, again like a maniac.  So much so that Sarah had to tell him to take it easy.  Back at the hostel, we cleaned up and went to eat dinner at a dumpling restaurant, followed by some dessert and Sarah obsessing over Kano posters.  At the hostel we talked for a little bit, but I was unconscious by 10:00, and stayed that way until about 9:30 the next morning.  We hurriedly ate a disappointing "western" breakfast at Shark Bites Toast, before sprinting across town with all our belongings to avoid missing our train.  We made it with seconds to spare.  Luckily we all had seats for the journey back, so I was able to sleep some more.  We arrived in Gongguan at about 3:30.