The local temple is a few houses down the street. You can spot it to the far left of the Shan Ding Lu banner at the top of the page. It is within earshot of the karaoke machine, baton dancing music , snake-oil sellers, fire-crackers and monthly gonging. To name the more noisy activities that take place there.
Our temple is fairly small by Taiwan standards. It services a few hundred households in the immediate area. But there is always some activity, day and night.
Of all the modes of transport all over the world it seems to be the fishing boat that maintain a localalized style. Airplanes, cars, ships, motorbikes and even bikes may have slight national differences but for the most part, there all tend to blend to the same globalized shape and style. I suspect fishing boats are different because they are built locally for local needs. The Taiwanese fishing boat highlights just how distinct a regional style can be.
These boats look quite unstable as they rock from side to side in the water. As if a push from one side would topple them over and expose the hull. But these are the boats that keep the local fish markets full.
Living on the heavily populated and industrialised plains around Koahsiung it is difficult to believe that just 25 km away there exists a great mountain range that is hardly populated, clean and mostly untouched. That is not to say they are completely covered in virgin rain-forest. No, all the really good timber was removed years ago through logging, any flattish area is used for cultivating something and many of the slopes are covered in betel nut plantations or orchards. But large tracks of the Taiwan mountain area are completely isolated and only accessible by foot.
For the southern two thirds of the island there are really only two roads that allow west to east travel through the mountain range. The middle road passes over at Hehuan shan at 3200m . The southern road passes over at Yakou at 2722m.
Travelling these roads it is easy to see why there are only the two. Much of the roadways hug closely to the rock walls, or pass over large gullies and streams. There are continuous teams of excavators and rock clearers keeping the road passable. When a typhoon passes through, the roads are normally closed for a few days to weeks at a time as they clear the rockfalls, rebuild the washouts and carve new tracks into the walls that have slid away. A drive along highway 20 is a drive along a geological work in progress.
We travelled on a weekend when a north easterly had drawn cold and dusty air down from the Gobi desert in northern China. The dust made the vista views of mountains quite misty. The cold made us realise we needed warmer clothes.
We live on the western edge of the plains of the Goaping river. We are a good 4 kilometres from the current river course. The plains have been long tamed by levees and are irrigated by water from the river year round. The tops of the levees are at least 20 metres from the river bed and are two kilometres apart. The main river bed itself varies in width but closest to us it is 200 metres wide at least.
A large part of the land between the levees is used for orchards and other agricultural use. But there is a small patch on the western side just north of the Wanda bridge that has a model racing car track. Most weekends you can find a few enthusiasts racing their cars. However, last weekend there was a championship race with a large number of cars in 2 divisions racing it out for all the prestige that model car racing has to offer.
