There are really two sights outside Taipei that are famous for tourism, Sun Moon Lake which we had been disappointed by, and Taroko Gorge. Which didn't disappoint at all. It was, if you will excuse the pun, gorgeous. (No, you are right, that is an inexcusable pun.)
Anyway, we started off at the visitor centre to pick up trail maps and make sure which ones were open given the heavy rains. The visitor centre itself was quite scenic.
And then up into the mountains to enjoy the scenery and a bit of hiking.
Now the best hike we did was for once not up a mountain, but alongside the river through the gorge. I can only liken it to a walk I did through Oak Creek Canyon, off the Grand Canyon in Arizona. No buildings in sight. Just the very attractive water, vegetation and the rocks themselves scoured out by the water. The rocks alone would make this a great geography field trip.
There is one point at which one can easily go down from the trail onto the rocks overlooking the water, which we couldn't easily resist. And in particular Thibault couldn't resist a good scramble amongst the boulders, partly to give Clarissa the opportunity to photograph him and partly because the 12 year old in him takes over in these places. I know him so well.
Now at this juncture I feel I should remark upon how different a person's perception of the same thing can be. Now for Thibault (and for some people I have read online, this walk was the spider walk. Now it is undoubtedly true that there were a lot of pretty impressive spiders webs up on the trees overlooking the river. But frankly I would have missed most of them had Thibault not pointed them out to me. And he noticed because he is arachnophobic. Indeed we eventually cut short this walk as the number of spiders started to increase and the poor chap was beginning to feel very uncomfortable.
Inevitably I have then proceeded to photograph them as they were of remarkable size. And spiders are very happy posing for photos.
On the other hand, to me this was a butterfly walk. There were loads of these beautiful insects scattered about. Unfortunately they do not like posing for photos as much as the spiders and just getting these shots took a heck of a lot of effort.
So my point is that whether one sees spiders or butterflies depends not so much on their numbers, but one's reactions to them. I see beauty so see butterflies: Thibault, well he sees spiders. I will leave the rest to teams of analysts.
So after our river walk we pressed on up into the mountains.
For this area they actually issue you with hard hats. In fact there were a lot of signs about warning you not to linger because the particular spot was prone to rockfalls. They didn't however offer any time period that would be considered an unacceptable risk. 1 minute, 10 minutes? How long before the odds are that a boulder will come crashing down on you?
