The Tourism Bureau said yesterday that Alishan (阿里山) in Chiayi County and Maolin Township (茂林) in Kaohsiung County suffered the worst damage from Typhoon Morakot of all the national scenic areas under its administration.
The Maolin National Scenic Area, which is known for its wide variety of butterflies, lost its Tourist Center to a mudslide.
The Directorate General of Highways managed to make Maolin accessible to small vehicles via Highways 27 and 28 and Sinwei Bridge (新威橋) on Monday.
PHOTO: MARTIN WILLIAMS, TAIPEI TIMES
The agency said, however, that Highway 18 to Alishan, which was severely damaged along its entire mountain segment, will not be open to traffic until Sept. 20.
Janice Lai (賴瑟珍), Tourism Bureau director-general, said the domestic travel industry was hit hard by the storm and its aftermath because the highways leading to the tourist attractions have been damaged and many people do not feel like traveling right now either, she said.
The bureau, however, has received requests from tourist shop owners in Alishan and Maolin, who say they want to reopen for business as soon as the highways become accessible.
To attract travelers from overseas, the bureau has compiled a list of tourist attractions in the north and center of the country and in Hualien that were not affected by the typhoon and has sent the list to its overseas divisions in an effort to stem the number of trip cancelations, Lai said at a press conference for the Taiwan Culinary Exhibition, which opens tomorrow.
The exhibition organizer will donate 10 percent of the ticket proceeds to disaster relief efforts, Lai said.
In related news, the National Communications Commission said yesterday that the nation’s three major telecom carriers have agreed to streamline procedures to suspend or cancel mobile phone services for typhoon victims.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching