Yuli: pretty cool-i. Hot Spring #3 and journey South via East Coast.

The first part of this blog should be called "Escape from Taipei" because after the museum trip, it became a sort of sprint-race to get me out of Taipei and onto a train. But first! We had to buy me a Taiwanese SIM card as I had been unable to do so at first because I had not paid off my phone to T Mobile so I had been using roaming data for the first week. I do not recommend this, it was not cool. SJ was super helpful getting me into and out of the Chunghwa Telecom store for the SIM card and then into a t 10 story Mall to buy a phone charge that was compatible with my power bank. We were running all over the student district near the train station and finally got me onto the train at 5pm. It gets dark at 5:30 here so I wasn't able to see much out the window of the train. I rode past the north east coast line and Taroko gorge (which I totally would have gone to on this trip but it has collapsed in a recent earthquake), so it was a bummer I wasn't able to see it, but I honestly was exhausted from my big day and slept a lot of it. I rolled into Yuli, my stop for the night at around 8pm. It was a small town to begin with, but it qas quite shut down for the night- the fourth photo below shows a dog camped out in front of a closed down stall! My hotel was called Fores3030 and it was very hipster and minimalist, as well as clean, neat and cheap (around $38$ for the night). I set about doing some sink laundry after buying some detergent in this store with another satisfying sock display, then had a sub-par ice cream bar and went to sleep.

In the morning, I took advantage of my jet lag early wake up early and have an adventure. My options for trains passing through Yuli were at 6am (no ma'am), 11:30 (ideal) 3pm ( fine) or 6pm (pretty late), so I walked to get breakfast at 6:30 to be ready for when the bike rental spot opened at 8am. Breakfast was at one of the zillion hole in the wall spots that occupy every street here. I watched moms pull up with kids on the front and back of scooters to order toast and hot soy milk for their kids before heading off to school. I sat at a table with two guys looking at a diagram of a some kind of engine. I think I was next to a hospital because people kept coming in and out in scrubs. There was someone who came in in scrubs and left with a large, catering-style box full of cups of tea (sturdy paper cups with the heat-sealed plastic lid, like you get at a bubble tea place are the absolute standard here), bringing enough for the whole office, I assume.

For myself, I got a hot black tea with soy milk (unfortunately I don't love the soy milk taste here, but I haven't fully explored my options and I do appreciate milk in tea), a dan bing breakfast crepe filled with tuna (not a good filling, I don't know what I was thinking), and pan fried dumplings (so greasy, so good). By 7:45 I was walking back to the spot in town where I hoped to rent a bike.

The bike place was not open by 8:03 so they lost my business and I went to a different place closer to the train station and my hotel- whcih turned out to be clutch when it came to be time to leave. The woman at the front of the conveneince store+rental spot was very patient with my Google Translate requests and wisely suggested that I not rent an e-bike or scooter for my 18k round trip journey, because they have a capacity for only 20k of distance and she didnt want it to die on me. She rented me a sturdy road bike with a nice basket in the front and I set off for An Tong hot spring!

Taiwan is know and loved for cycling and Yuli is a stop along the main route along the East coast. So I was able to get on the cycle-way within a kilometer of riding through the town. Immediately, I was surrounded by rice paddies, small and large gardens/fields and just open space. I crossed a wide riverbed with a low flow of silty water- I think that this is below a dam, and there was defintiely some construction happinging along the side of the river bed. One of the reasons that I chose this town to stop in is because this section of the route crossed between two tectonic plates- the Yangtze subplate of the Eurasian plate and the Phillipine Sea plate. You can see me and my bike posing betwen the two plates below. This is officially as far East as I have ever gone in my life and I felt a little shiver looking out towards the horizon, knowing that the Pacific ocean lay beyond it and that I've only seen that from the Western side of it. Idk, thrills.

Over on the Phillipine Sea Plate, I rode another 7 or so kilometers. Soon after the bridge, the bike-way was closed for construction and I had to ride along the highway. At first I was scared, but, like most things in Taiwan, the road was extremely well labeled and had a wide shoulder for two-wheeled vehicles. There was a wall hiding the construction which also provided wind protection- there was strong wind coming through!

I also experienced my first and so far only experience even close to harassment here: a young kid stuck his head out of the car that was passing me and yelled "wooohoo!"

My goal with this settlment of An Tong, which had a public hot spring by a park and a private resport hot spring.

I got there a little hot n sweaty and locked my bike using this nifty lockying mechanism that just had the key inserted into it the entire time it was not locked so it would be hard to loose the key. Of course, I was terrified someone would just pick up the bike and steal it, but I tried to be trusting.

The public hot spring was pretty nice, with a few wide concrete pools with HOT water coming out of spigots, next to a nice creek and several old people chillin in and around it. Unfortunately, within 5 minutes of my arrival, a team of annoying tik-tok style idiiots came to film at the site and I got tired of it quick, didn't want to be on camera for whatever show they were doing, and left. The resort across the street had an option to enter for 3 hours for about $12 so I did that and spent an hour lazing in various pools- the one pictured with a slide was closed but the other onese were great, including rocks to lie and stretch on in the pools, a variety of temps, and some cascade/waterfall kinda things. It was also very empty, with just some sleepy Dutch people and a couple who both had deformed legs chillin there. I also got to take a shower in the traditional bath room and talk to the spa owner about his fond memories of his trip to Canada 20 years ago.

After my bath it was 10:40 so I had to BOOK IT back to the city. I rode back as fast as I could, stopping but for a moment to enjoy my tectonic plate crossing. The cycle-way took me into town and back to Hostel Forest 3030, where I grabbed my backpack and rode back to the rental place, very loaded down. The lady who rented to me started to get angry at me because I had adjusted the seat on the bike too high and apparently that was dangerous or bad in some other way? I didn;t have time to try to communicate about it because my train was leaving so soon, so I just said "sorry" and literally ran down the block to the train.

Upon entering the train station, I realized I was going to have to run up one flight of stairs and down one flight of stairs- this is typical in all the stations, I now see, but I was surprised and even more out of breath when I got on my train where I was unfortunately seated next to a pimpy teen boy who stared at me as I got my sweaty self settled in for the 3.5 hour ride. Luckily he soon fell asleep, and me, my onigiri and Bulbasaur could enjoy the views of the mountains, river beds, and fields.

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