The Green Trails trek along the foothills of the Central Mountain Range enters its third week with no major mishaps but plenty of small surprises, not all of them the kind that the promoters of the National Trails Network might be particularly happy to know about.
Having missed out on climbing the Northern Dawu Peak on the fifth day of the trek, the participants of the Green Trail Trek headed for the trailhead to make the walk up to Old Haocha, from where they would cut up across to Wutai, a center of the Lukai Aboriginal people.
PHOTO: IAN BARTHOLMEW, TAIPEI TIMES
The biggest excitement on this part of the trail was assaults by bees, who took a numerous and varied toll on the trekkers. The first attack by bees had happened on the second day of the trek, but was relatively minor. The second attack, on the road to Haocha, laid low Chen Hsin-nan (
A strong walker, Chen was unable to do much after taking numerous stings, but at the time, the trek was already close to Haocha, and help was on hand for the trekkers in the form of local residents and Forestry Bureau staff who were expecting the arrival of the trekkers.
Another moment of excitement with the sighting of a 100-pace snake, a sacred animal of local Aborigines and also one of Taiwan's most deadly venomous snakes. General precautions ensured that the meeting was educational rather than frightening.
Speaking to Forestry Bureau staffer Weng Li-hsin (
Haocha presented another sight of abandoned slate villages, though these in somewhat better condition than the previously visited Gulou. It gave trekkers plenty to think about, an aspect of the trip that group leader Wu Yuan-ho (
Passing through these monuments to the Paiwan people's former glory, the trekkers were headed to a meeting with another, and better documented historical event -- the Wutai Incident. This event, which led to the death of many Aborigines, took place in 1914 as a result of a rebellion against the heavy hand of Japanese rule.
"When climbing through these areas, you are in close touch with Taiwan's history," Wu said when explaining the course of the trek before it set off.
Living history was met with in the shape of Tu Ba-nan (
As the trek entered its third week, they moved into central Taiwan.
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
Wooden houses wedged between concrete, crumbling brick facades with roofs gaping to the sky, and tiled art deco buildings down narrow alleyways: Taichung Central District’s (中區) aging architecture reveals both the allure and reality of the old downtown. From Indigenous settlement to capital under Qing Dynasty rule through to Japanese colonization, Taichung’s Central District holds a long and layered history. The bygone beauty of its streets once earned it the nickname “Little Kyoto.” Since the late eighties, however, the shifting of economic and government centers westward signaled a gradual decline in the area’s evolving fortunes. With the regeneration of the once
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
Perched on Thailand’s border with Myanmar, Arunothai is a dusty crossroads town, a nowheresville that could be the setting of some Southeast Asian spaghetti Western. Its main street is the final, dead-end section of the two-lane highway from Chiang Mai, Thailand’s second largest city 120kms south, and the heart of the kingdom’s mountainous north. At the town boundary, a Chinese-style arch capped with dragons also bears Thai script declaring fealty to Bangkok’s royal family: “Long live the King!” Further on, Chinese lanterns line the main street, and on the hillsides, courtyard homes sit among warrens of narrow, winding alleyways and
RSS