Fulong Beach

My next excursion was to Fulong Beach with Eva, Mami, Tim, and Caleb.  I was fairly sick, so getting up super early to catch the MRT to Taipei Main station was nearly impossible.  We met the guys there and bought our tickets to Fulong, which is a popular coastal area in the north of Taiwan.  After a 90 minute train ride we rented our bikes for the day and started along our designated route.  We biked through a pretty long tunnel before stopping at a rocky beach and to skip rocks for a while.  We stopped here and there, and at one point hiked up a staircase (as is the Taiwanese custom) to a lighthouse, where we took pictures, and had pictures taken of us (white people become more fascinating as you leave the Taipei area).  At this point, we had already gone more than half way around our route, so we decided to finish the loop.  At the end, we hung out on a (very dirty) public beach, having bamboo battles and writing Chinese characters in the sand.  After we returned our bikes, we bought tickets for a train that was leaving at that moment, so we sprinted onto the train right into the middle of a huge group of Taiwanese soldiers, who stared at us and made us question whether we had gotten on the right train or not.  We stood the entire ride back, and my fever was starting to spike, so I felt pretty crappy.  We finally got off the train and wolfed down some food at a Japanese Ramen restaurant, followed by some Coldstone ice cream before heading home.