Day 10 of my Taiwan Tales and an epic Grad Trip! It’s our last day in Lyudao and it’s just P, C and me left now that J and K have headed back home. Our ferry is due in the afternoon, so we spend the morning wandering around nearby. It’s a hot, hot day! We walk into Nan Liao village for some breakfast. There’s a little abandoned looking road which we consider hiking up, but give up in about 5 minutes because we had no idea where it headed to and it was an uphill climb!
We head back up to the Guesthouse and to the Lighthouse. Couldn’t go up because it’s still in use today, but it did have a great view of the surrounding area. It overlooks the pool where we saw people snorkelling, and is not as shallow as we initially thought.
Pic of awkward me at the lighthouse
We head back to the guesthouse to check out, and walk back into Nan Liao village again for a quick lunch. There were sea-facing benches behind the Family Mart where we enjoyed the ocean view and had a quick bite. Back at the guesthouse, we chitchat with our lovely guesthouse hosts before they fetch us to the jetty area.
To whit – the wonderful Xiao Lan Jie who manned reception and was wonderfully helpfully in coordinating our various activities, Ah Wu who owned the deer and kindly let us try out his scooter for kicks, the silent Lai Ge who fetched us around in his van. Lyudao was a complete surprise to us and these people sure made it better than we could have imagined!
Back at the ferry, we shove our way up the ferry and manage decent seats, though the ride back is quite a lot smoother than the one to the island! No major pukefest even though P had dosed herself with an extra shot of seasick pills just in case. Quite uneventfully, we reached Taitung harbour where our new host was all ready to pick us up. Nicknamed ‘Xiao Pang’, he really did look like Sammo Hung as our Guesthouse lady described!
Li Pin Guesthouse is set in a tea plantation. It’s a single story building – hardly anything in Lu Ye is higher than 2 storeys!
We head out to Lu Ye in a more rural area of Taitung county. The Guesthouse is named Li Pin Guesthouse and located in the middle of a tea plantation! We are welcomed at the front building which is staffed by an old man and old lady, who were really quite fascinated about how these 3 Singaporean girls managed to find their way to Taitung, which tends to be off the main tourist route.
Our room – 2 double beds, lots of space to wander around and a TV set to boot!
Our rooms are in the back and they’re quite large. Each room is named after a different type of tea – ours is the Fo Shou tea room. P is pretty groggy still from the seasick pills so she naps while C and I strike a bargain with Xiao Pang on the rates and figure out what we’ll be doing for the next 3 days.
When P woke up, it’s time for dinner and XP brings us to something that looks like a Visitor Centre of sorts where we enjoy a home-cooked feast. And when I say feast, I mean feast. There was A LOT of food. And also the biggest mosquitoes I have ever seen, argh! But it was pretty great food.
We head over to his friend’s farm after dinner – it’s pitch black out and there aren’t many street lights here. We go firefly hunting to no avail, but we do get to see all the other animals on the farm, like tree frogs and snakes etc. His friend even breaks out some old snail shells and a glue gun and we set to creating our own little fake snail sculptures!
Us making snail sculptures. That one you see in the right corner is an actual live snail which we set loose later on that night, on which we glued a flower to and wrote “Unholies 2007”. Wonder if that shell lasted?
We made one for ourselves (and tried to outdo each other at every point) and combined to make one for K to give her later. It was really fun, though I was always a bit worried about spoiling my snail piece during the rest of the journey… The farm owner later tells us this crafty exercise is his little effort to show how pests like snails can actually be ‘useful’.
After that, XP brought us to this point up in the hills called Gao Tai where the paragliding takes place. It has a sloping downwards ledge which we sit on and admire the night lights from. Unlike cities like Taipei, Taitung is a lot less brightly lit and its lights are sparse since houses are few and far between. We spend some time up here before returning to the guesthouse to turn in for the night.
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