I’m off for Taroko National park today which has one of the deepest canyons in the world. The train leaves from Taipei main station, and it seemed to spend half it’s time in tunnels on the way to Hualien. Taiwan isn’t an easy place to build roads or railways, so you can either go through the mountains or over them. Since train’s are sensitive to steep grades, they end up going through them. The train followed a valley out of Taipei, before eventually emerging at the coast.

Taipei is a great city to explore, transportation is very convenient via it’s MRT (subway) and for the most part the streets are pedestrian friendly. In a place like Hanoi or Bangkok, sidewalks are just glorified scooter parking lots and walking around is not very enjoyable. In Taipei, the road is wide enough to accommodate scooter parking and pedestrians.

Being a morning person, at least temporarily tends to help when having to catch early flights. My flight was out at around 10AM, but I still hadn’t figured out the route to my hotel yet or what I wanted to see for the day so I got packed up and headed to the airport 2 hours early so I had a bit of time to research some attractions before my flight. The Japanese have their own take on security theatre, every passenger on the shuttle bus had the show their ID before being allowed through the checkpoint into the airport. The check only took about 2 minutes and wasn’t very thorough. The flight actually turned out to be pretty scenic, first I got a good view of Tokyo bay from the plane.

I know the updates have been sparse lately, but I’m trying to catch up now. Jetlag turns me from an evening person, into a morning person believe it or not. I’m typically up at 7 or 7:30AM, and I’m ready to head to bed by 10PM. Given that I’ve wanted to catch up on blogging in the evening, this makes it slightly difficult.

I’m packed and ready to go, and I made sure to include the important stuff: