But as soon as you reach the foot of the mountain range you are in a very different place. The flat populated plains change to precipitous forested ranges. The mountains are sliced by deeply cut valleys created by typhoon fed rivers.

The brief two months of Southern Taiwan’s mild winter have now past. In a few weeks the tropical rains will start and the stifling humidity will have people searching for cool relief. These last two years we have found that relief in the many pools and waterfalls accessible along the mountain range. Here are some of our favorites and directions on how to find them.

Chingtang waterfall(欽堂瀑布). This is a gem of a spot. It is a short walk up an overgrown and rock fallen path off the Southern Cross Island highway at one of the last places you can reach the main river before the road rises above the river bed. It is not sign posted which makes it quiet and secluded. Of the 5 or so times we have stoppped we’ve always had the place to ourselves. Its great for a cool swim or a BBQ. Park on the side of the road opposite the huge rock scree. Use the Google map below to help find it.

The same waterfall immediately after a typhoon

Meiya waterfall (美雅) This is one of a number of waterfalls in the Maolin National Scenic area. Not ideal for swimming and the walk up to the waterfall itself requires some scrambling over rocks since the suspension bridge and path was washed away in a typhoon a couple of years ago. One of the bridge’s main pillars can be seen under the pile of rocks below.

On one of the two cold weekends a year it is worthwhile visiting the Duona hot springs (多納) deep inside the Maolin National Scenic Area. Though not glamorous, the half dozen concrete baths have varying temperatures and there is always a friendly crowd.

If the water is not too high, walk up river a little to find hot water seeping from the riverbed.

There are a couple of other waterfalls at Maolin like this one at Lovers Valley. Not so great for swimming though.

Dajin waterfall (大津瀑布) This is close to the Maolin National Scenic Area and a short climb up an incredibly wide and well made path. It is well signposted and quite popular.  China Post published a great article on Dajin waterfall last year.

Rainbow waterfall(彩虹瀑布) is an all day adventure to reach. Firstly you need to enter the Sandimen police check point which means you will require some ID and 10yuan along with a reason you wish to enter. This is probably the last roadside checkpoint police station that remains along the mountains. I wouldn’t be surprised if it too is closed down shortly.

Follow Pingtung county road 31 to the very end. Even through the narrow laned Dashe (大社) village. Be prepared to wait as the locals park and chat on the road and aren’t in any hurry to move along.

Follow the small narrow road to the point where you are comfortable you can still drive back then follow the track on foot until you reach the river bed. Follow the river bed until you find a waterfall. From the police station it is probably 40mins drive, 20 mins walk on the track then 30 mins walk up the river bed. Not ideal after rain as you need to wade across the river a few times. Great for seclusion, swimming or a BBQ. There are a number of other great waterfalls and trails inside the Sandimen area that are well worth visiting.

Liangshan waterfall (涼山瀑布) is actually a series of pools and waterfalls with a covered BBQ area and clean toilets. The main pool is mostly shallow and safe for kids. It is a great spot and very popular on the weekends. Make sure you walk the 20 minute path from the main swimming area to the large waterfall at the end. About halfway along the trail are a series of steps that lead down to a great little swimming hole.

Anping water hole (安平) This is our favorite local BBQ destination as it is the quickest and easiest to reach from Daliao and Kaohsiung. It has a great swimming area for kids with large flat shallow areas. It is reasonably popular but we always meet the nicest people there. One guy told me you can avoid paying the 50yuan parking fee by continuing along the road past the parking area and walking down a small path. I say pay the parking and enjoy the amenities. Well, those that remain after a typhoon in 2007!

Laiyi(來義) is another of our favorites. Follow the rough old road to the very end and pay the 50 yuan parking fee. Don’t stop at the beautiful pool immediately under the KTV slot machine station, unless you have a penchant for listening to woeful karaoke. Walk up river a little and stop by one of the many pools. We have occasionally seen river tracing groups here as the river is great for tracing.  China Post wrote on a waterfall immediately behind the closed police post in Laiyi though we have never visited it.

Nanhe river (南和) is yet another of our favorites. There is no waterfall and the river can be a bit rapid. But the point we visit is the joining of two rivers with a suspension bridge over the top. There are plenty of pools and places to BBQ.

Make use of the Google map to find your way. Be warned, the Pingtung county roads are windy and its very easy to get lost. It is worth noting that many of the places I describe above were found while getting lost trying to find something else!

View Larger Map

If you have any questions, suggestions or corrections please leave a comment.

Time exposure looking west to the setting New Year moon. The twin urban glows of Pingtung and Kaohsiung shine up through the sea of clouds.

If you look due east from Kaohsiung past the suburban sprawl, Daliao, the Gaoping river and the Pingtung plains you should see the 3000m Dawu mountain range only 35 kilometres away.

Occasionally around sunrise and a few days after each typhoon the mountains are visible to everyone. Otherwise Dawu is obscured by the industrial smog, rural burns, tropical air and the very fine alluvial dust that 4 million odd people trample.

As soon as you start to climb above the population soup the mountains emerge.

After a long rough winding mountain road you reach the trail head at 1540m

It is a 4 hour hike from the trail head to the hut. The trail is well marked and a good climb.

The hut sleeps 60 with further camping grounds for dozens of tents. Because of the week long Chinese New Year holiday and the miserable northern Taiwan winter drizzle the trail was busy and the hut was full.

We slept on benches under the balcony which was fine until about 1:30 am when super-keen hikers started preparing to for an accent to the summit for sunrise. We started the final climb at 3:30am and reached the ridge for sunrise. It is a further hour or so along the ridge to the top of North Dawu peak.

There were a few patches of ice left over from the cold front two weeks earlier.

And lots of red cedars, pines and small patches of alpine bamboo.

There was a little wildlife too.

We met some wonderful people along the trail. Lots of young and older couples, hiking groups, a few family groups too. Even some Taiwan resident Canadians and Australian making a dry New Years get-away from the north.

Along with the view from the top, the highlight was the sunset viewed from just before Juniper lodge. The sea of clouds is famous in the southern mountains but not always reliable.

There really are two Taiwans. One is above 1000 metres and is clean, sparsely populated and beautiful. When you are lucky you can see for miles and miles above the sea of clouds. The other exists below 1000 metres and is crowded, polluted and when you are lucky you can sometimes see the other through the swamp of smog.

Looking due north along the Southern first Section trail to Guanshan and the Southern Cross island highway.

Practicalities

You can reach the trailhead through Taiwu on Pingtung county road 106. Get your mountain permit from the police station in Taiwu.  The friendly police checked our gear, map and basic plan and waved us on when translation of the two forms became too difficult.

The trail requires some fitness but is not technically difficult. It can be easily done in two days if you start day 2 early.  The hut is well set-up with water and “mountain dump” toilets.

Though you don’t need one for this hike, if you would like a good detailed hiking map of the mountain try Books from Taiwan.

We started the day early with our first stop the police station at Lili (力里) to get our mountain permit. Mountain permits are a hangover from Japanese occupation and KMT military era when tight control over access to the mountains was maintained. They seem hardly relevant these days and if we were to walk the trail from the Eastern side they are not required.

Thanks to a military radar post at the top of the mountain it is possible to drive a 20 km track to the trail-head at 1420 metres. This means you do the 16km trail on an almost continuous downward slope.

The trail is well marked and well maintained. In fact it is a popular mountain biking trail and with so many cyclists in Taiwan even remote trails like this manage to get a few adventures. This party of 5 was well equipped and had arranged a lift to the top so they could cycle over three hours to the Eastern side. They even had a helmet mounted video camera to record their thrillful ride.

We had a hiking perfect day with blue sky, no wind and no rain. Not even a misty afternoon cloud to dampen the day.

The recommended hiking time is 6 hours. At 3 hours out and 5 kilometers down we realised hiking with small ones would mean we could be finishing in the dark. Not a wonderful prospect but we pushed on.

The kids were fantastic. We tried to slow them down at the start as they were prone to running ahead then running back before running ahead again. Of course this exuberance withered and we had to do a little carrying and encouraging by trail end.

Perhaps thanks to the traveling noise-crowd that we were, we saw little bird or wildlife. Not even many butterflies,  though we did find this ungainly spider.

There are a number of old police stations along the route though little remains other than piles of rocks to remind you of the time when Japanese police and their families lived in this remote place. The sign at one settlement says 30 Japanese police and their families were killed during an incident in 1924.

We reached the Gu-alun suspension bridge at the trail end just after dusk. 8 hours after our start. This could have been an ugly end as there was still 4 kms of river bed to walk and wade before the village where we could arrange a lift to the Dawu (大武) train station. We were very fortunate when a motorcyclists arrived and said he would send someone to come and pick us up. So we all waited by the river, watched for stars and chased fireflies. A superb ending to a glorious walk.

The fellow who picked us up was a real character. He drove us past his house so we could meet his family, then past some friends place all while his minivan stereo played loud New York rap. He dropped us at the Dawu train station in good time to catch the 8:05 train back to Kaohsiung. We were all so exhausted we slumped on the floor of the train while Catherine enthralled a curious group of travelers with our day’s story.

Practicalities

This is an easy hike but you need to arrange transport at least to the Western trail-head. Lili is about an hour’s drive from Kaohsiung. Drive East along Expressway 88 then South on Freeway 3 to the Nanzhou exit. Head South on highway 1 towards Kenting then turn left at Pingtung county road 132 toward Lili.

From Lili follow the road past the police station for about an hour to reach the trail-head.

The 6 hours recommended time would be ideal for average hikers. If you have small children, add a couple more hours.

Though we had perfect hiking weather, the mountain pass section receives over 5200 mm of rain a year so odds are you may encounter some showers.

View Larger Map

To demonstrate the absurdity of China-Taiwan relations, Chen and Ma finally managed to meet on the provision that Ma could be introduced as President of Taiwan and Chen would neither protest or acknowledge the “president” title for the leader of “the renegade province”. For neither protesting nor acknowledging, Taiwan now infers that China agrees to Ma’s “mutual non-denial” policy. That is, that both China and Taiwan will no longer pretend that the other doesn’t exist. So the diplomatic coup for Taiwan is “that China is not denying the mutual non-denial policy”.

And to reach that historic step the newly elected Taiwan government had to deploy an enormous police force to contain protests, stop display of the Taiwanese flag, and other patriotic actions. They have simultaneously run a political witch-hunt and detained, without charge, a number of the opposition party. Many feel they have taken an “improve economic ties with China” mandate to regress civil rights, oppress the opposition and quietly return Taiwan to China. Most seem too apathetic to care.

But all is not lost. Though political, social and economic control may be sliding westward, thanks to 50 years of an obsessive concrete fixation, a speedy physical relocation of Taiwan to China still remains unlikely.

A seaside or river photo from Taiwan almost invariably includes images of stacked concrete tetra-blocks. As a nation that is swept by 5 or 6 typhoons a year these concrete lumps are used to restrain the oceans and contain the rivers. Indeed, it feels like the civil engineers of Taiwan are determined to maintain the coastal shape and river courses. And inadvertently make the effort of moving Taiwan next to China a little more difficult.

On Lanyu Island the only two harbours are made entirely from these blocks.

On Shaoliouchiou island two designs reinforce the concrete wall and the top of the limestone reef.

The tetra-mold model-A in production use.

The Gaoping river on sections before it reaches the mud-plains.

Random splatterings of concrete from around the island.

Caishan village and fishing harbour, Kaohsiung.

You might well be thinking, how absurd is it that China would really want to move Taiwan 150 kilometers West across the strait. Only slightly less absurd than the charades and double-talk of the perpetual cross-strait stand-off.

A mushroom walks into a bar and asks for a beer. The bartender says “Sorry we don’t serve mushrooms here”. To which the mushroom replies. “That’s not fair, I’m just a fun guy” (Fungi).

On the recent Batongguan hike I took many photos of the fungi we passed. Though not catalogue quality shots, this sample represents the huge range of mushrooms, lichen and other fungi to be found in the mountains here.

Mushrooms

Lichen

Bracket Polypores

Others

You can see all of these in the Batongguan Fungi album

Want a good reference book on plants in Taiwan? You’ll probably find something at Books from Taiwan

I was very fortunate to join Richard at Barking Deer Adventures on this restricted hiking trip. Five of us started from Dongpu 東浦¦ at 1200m, climbed to the Batongguan meadows at 2900m, took a side trip to the peak of Yushan (Taiwan’s highest at 3952m), trekked for two days around 3000m before descending over 3 day to the eastern entrance of the Yushan national park near Yuli 玉里 at 400m. What a truly incredible hike. For its remoteness, variety of landscape, difficulty, and historical significance.

Though we were in view of the summit of Yushan for more than four days of the hike, we only saw the top on the occasion we were 10m from it. A cold front brought low clouds over much of the area above 3000m for these four days. Ah, such are the uncertainties of mountain hiking. We did have plenty of ice, rain and cold wind for our Yushan climb.

The trail follows the old Japanese central cross island route. This was a well constructed and gently contoured trail maintained by the Japanese from around 1920 until 1944. There were many old police stations along the route, these were established to contain and subdue the original aboriginal tribes in the mountains.

The geology of the trail is also very interesting. Most of it is in siltstone shales. This is very soft rock and prone to sliding. Consequently, while most of the terrain is very steep, there are few vast sheer drops and plenty of landslides. Of the original trail, more than half of the middle section has slipped away or been spilled over with rockfalls. The last 15km of the trail are through harder mica schist. That provides more precipitous river views.

We stayed in trail huts each night. These are fantastic resources and a huge credit to the national park service. Some were quite rudimentary but generally they are well designed, well built and well maintained.

As with any mountain trekking in Taiwan there were a number of suspension bridges. Here an old rusty wire and wood bridge was left next to a very new one. Thankfully there were none of this vintage we needed to cross. Though only a few years earlier there were still plenty along this trail.

Covering such a large range of altitude meant we saw very different plants, insects and animals along the way.

The alpine meadows above 3000m

Cool misty damp forest

Short scrub in the mountain rain shadows.

Enormous trees

And typical Taiwan forest too.

Overall the Batongguan trail is an incredible hike. As we regularly said while walking, “It will be strange when the hike is over and we have to return to Taiwan”

Update: Fellow hiker Robert has an excellent daily account with some of the practicalities for the hike and lots more photos in a series of blog entries at Pashan

If you need a good hiking map of the area try Books from Taiwan.

We made a 5 day island tour across the southern cross island highway, east coast, Taroko Gorge, Hehuan Shan in snow and back past Sun Moon Lake to Kaohsiung. On their last day here we made a day trip to Taipei to see the bike exhibition followed by dinner then returned to Kaohsiung in the evening.

It was this last day’s trip to a city 400 km away that made me realise just how incredibly easy life has become in Taiwan.

We live approximately 5 km from expressway 88. This was completed around 8 years ago and is just a small addition to the incredible freeway system that makes car travel in Taiwan so convenient.

The new High Speed Rail is connected directly to this freeway system so we parked in the car park and within 10 minutes purchased tickets from the simple to use ticket machine and were on the 10:06 express to Taipei.

This train has just two intermediate stops and covers the 400 odd km in 1 hour 36 min at around 300kmh. The ride is smooth, the staff are friendly and the whole experience is fantastic.

In Taipei we caught the incredible efficient and growing MRT system to the brand new Nangang exhibition centre to see the largest bike exhibition in the world. As the MRT does not quite yet reach here we used the free shuttle bus.

After quickly looking at more bicycle frames and handle bars than I ever thought existed, we went shopping at the Miramar in the Neihu shopping district.

And then as a final meal we ate at the amazing Five Dime restaurant.

This is a truly exceptional place that would rank as one of the worlds best themed restaurants.

After dinner we made the three hour return to Kaohsiung via taxi, MRT, HSR and car.

This was a world class experience in a world class nation. I love Taiwan.

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.

As it all happened, geologically speaking. A Taiwan vivisection.

A carefully crafted suspension bridge had its foundations washed downstream.

Some keen young campers on there way over the pass. We met them here at around 1200m preparing for the 4C air at the 2700m pass.

A rock scree that joins the main river.

A large landslide has resulted in the road being rebuilt over the rubble.

Maintaining roads in the precipitous mountains where a typhoon can drop over a metre of rain in 24 hours is hard work. Here are a few of the images of this road.

Oops.The embankment here has slipped a little as the rock scree from above the road has made its way down the slope.

Finally at the top of the pass is a tunnel that saves the road climbing another 300 metres

On the other side of the tunnel there is a crowd. And where there is a crowd in Taiwan there is always a food vendor. This one is selling hot broth soup to add some warmth to the cold souls who venture to the 4C air.

Just over the pass on the Eastern side is a guest house that offers warm beds and hot food. A welcoming place that seems precariously placed on a flat piece of ground adjacent a crumbling rock face. A large filled crack runs across the floor of the dining room, down the stairs and through the guest rooms. We reassuringly slept in a room on the uphill side of the crack.

The Southern cross island highway is a very worthwhile trip. One I hope to do again with a little more time to hike the many trails to the peaks along the way.

I recently bought a Nikon D40x camera and hope to make good use of it filling the web with photos of life in Taiwan.

What better subject for my camera’s first photo than the salesman…
You have a trust a smile like that.

Lu Shan is a favourite hot springs resort in the mountains. It is nestled in a valley and filled with hotels, restaurants and karaoke bars. Quite picturesque

This is a landslide on a walking track at the back of Lu Shan. Unfortunately the landslide has restricted access to some of the resorts further up the river valley. Lu Shan is at around 1500 metres altitude. It is a pleasant retreat from the hot and humid summer on the Taiwan plains.

But it is only part way to our destination…

He Huan Shan is above 3000 metres.

This is a great escape from the hot, humid, crowded and dusty plains of Taiwan. It is cool, dry, sparse and the air is crystal clear.

Quite romantic too. In those rare moments it is not cloudy, raining, snowing or blowing a gale.

The guest house at He Huan Shan. A dorm bed and two hot meals for 520 yuan

The mountain areas are truly beautiful and varied. The conditions are harsh and the plants and animals adapt.

A juniper that has bonsai-ed itself amongst the rocks and soil on top of He Huan Shan

You are never far from a hot meal

A keen cyclist we met on the way. He rode from 1200m to 3100m on this day. An ordinary bike with pretty ordinary gear. Very keen…

And on the way home we stopped by a banana shop. It could be anywhere in South-East Asia.