Taipei County, Taiwan – Monday, May 9th, 2011
Usually my travel schedules are pretty packed, which made this day an anomaly: I had nothing on my agenda. With the theme park schedules mostly spread out over two weekends, that had initially allotted me four days in Taipei, but by Monday I had found that my travel companions had either returned to Hong Kong or were otherwise preoccupied, and I had already seen everything in and around Taipei that I was willing to spend more money on. That was when a poster in the hostel caught my eye:
Skinny dipping with complete strangers in the middle of nowhere? Sure. What could go wrong? At only NT$100 (~USD $3.3) and taking nearly the entire day, it seemed a good plan to discover something new and not let the day go to waste. As long as I didn’t think too much about the skinny dipping part…
We set off bright and early to take the public transport out to a fairly remote station near the hills south of Taipei. Wulai is well known in Taiwan for its hot springs, although the guide from our hostel was taking us to his “secret” river trail not officially open to the public. There would be a very long walk to get there, first through the nearby village. Fortunately it was a pleasant spring day and we had all packed water and snacks.
The route along the Nanshi river is quite beautiful, a far contrast from the crowded metropolis of nearby Taipei.
The Wulai Scenic Train is a funky-looking miniature railway that transports tourists 1.6 km to see the waterfalls. We’d be saving our money to complete the hike on foot.
Taking a rest break on a bridge, here are my fellow three adventurers with our hostel guide on the right. (Apologies, with all the time since this trip I’ve forgotten their names.)
I didn’t take many pictures along the route, mostly engaged in conversation. The recent assassination of bin Laden was the big conversation piece of the day (ah, simpler times…), although I also spent a while with our guide trying to suss out the political distinctions between Taiwan and China raised at Window on China. No luck on getting a concrete answer.
As we eventually wound our way closer to our destination, the conversations took a slightly awkward turn to the question of… well, did we still plan to do everything on the itinerary?
Here we finally turned off the trail into what was technically a “no trespassing” zone. Poisonous snakes? Rock slides? Are we sure this is still a good idea? Will this turn into an Asian version of Deliverance?
Trekking up the rocky river. This would be a particularly bad place to suffer a sprained ankle.
We finally arrived to our remote destination… and we all immediately stripped naked and jumped in together!
Okay, so obviously it didn’t quite happen like that. It was pretty clear right away none of us were all that interested in the skinny dipping part of the itinerary. Most of the group just spent some time swimming in their bathing wear. Being a lifelong aqua-averse who didn’t bring a swimsuit to Taiwan nor wanting to dry out my clothes in the hostel, I just waded up to my shins. For all the build-up it was certainly a rather anticlimactic payoff, but the day was always going to be more about the journey than the destination anyway. (But I didn’t take any more photos so I can’t technically prove I’m not lying about all that happened… although I’d hope I could come up with a less lame story than this one if that were the case.)
The day’s relaxed pace and focus on going specifically to an “anti-tourist” site no one knows about was much different than I had come to expect during my international travels, reminding me more of the backwoods hiking I’d used to do during summer camp in Michigan. I even grabbed a can of ice cold sarsaparilla from a vending machine on the way back; something I never expected to see outside the U.S. but apparently it’s quite popular in Taiwan.
We stopped to enjoy a cheap group dinner together at an anonymous cafe outside Taipei and celebrate the day’s minor accomplishments. Then, sweaty and sun-burnt, returned to the hostel for a much needed shower and change of clothes. I’d be back to the grind of a busy travel schedule early the next morning, but I could relax and rest well that night.
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