My first major sight-seeing trip here in Taiwan was to Alishan. This is an area high up in the mountains, known for its beauty and for a lovely little railway you can ride to visit various mountain shrines, lakes, ancient trees, etc. As we started up the mountain we passed a park-like setting where a young couple was having their wedding photos taken. They were posing in front of a pair of cartoon-esque creatures that I was told are the traditional figures for the farmer and his wife. I wondered if this has some connection with a wish for prosperity and fertility, who knows? Just beyond this scene of newly married bliss was a very long suspension bridge and an ornate temple where we stopped for a few photos.
sculpture near temple
temple near suspension bridge
Suspension bridge
The farmer takes a wife..
It’s quite a distance from where I’m staying up to Alishan and it took what seemed like half of forever to reach it. The mountain road up to the forest is very narrow, barely two lanes wide…and not always that, er, “generous”. There were several places where there had been landslides or some other damage had occurred to the road and they were in various stages of repair. Which is to say they were passable, but not always by more than one car at a time. Which gets very interesting when you factor in the huge amount of tour buses which were also on their way to Alishan.
road repairs
But make it we did. As we were approaching the actual entrance gate to the park (where we paid what was an enormous entrance fee, for Taiwan anyway, of over $20 for the three of us who went) we passed row after row of tour buses that had discharged their passengers, then went lower to park. I quite certain that we passed at least 60 to 80 buses. (Yikes!) That’s a seriously large amount of tourists. Almost all of whom were Chinese or Taiwanese. And this was on a weekday, after tourists season had ended. Then, once inside the park, there was an additional fee to ride the little train up higher on the mountain.
We took some pictures on the platform while awaiting our little train, then were finally able to board for the 8-10 minute long chug up the hill. It had become quite overcast the further up the mountain we had gone. By the time we reached the little train, clouds had rolled in in earnest, and they were sinking. By the time the little train reached us so had the clouds. So any pictures we were able to take were “through a cloud darkly”, to borrow and misquote.
sculpture at the station
extra trains for “busy” days
Still, there is a grace and beauty to a perfect fog. A fog not so deep that it hides all, nor so light that it is a mere will-o-the-wisp. A perfect fog wraps everything in a tenuous mist; a veil that both obscures and illuminates. It sharpens the senses, yet dulls the sounds. It is the smoke that hides and the magician that directs the eye. Nature’s prestidigitation, weaving it’s spell and binding your imagination to the story it desires to tell. Dimming the lights here and allowing they spotlight to shine…There!….for only an instant…allowing your mind to fill in the details. That’s the fog we found ourselves in, for the most part.
As we left the train station, we allowed the tour groups to get ahead of us so that we could enjoy a little solitude (only a little. There were a lot of people on that mountain!) and get some pictures where the desired subject was not almost completely obscured by a wall of bodies. (A side note here: Alishan is known far-and-wide for its sunrises. It is the place to be when the sun comes up. There are several hotels at the top of the mountain just so people can be there when the sun first starts lighting the sky.) By positioning ourselves behind most of the large groups that had just gotten off the train we did manage to get some shots where the scenery was the major focus. Not always easy, but occasionally doable.
Into the mist
fallen tree “arch”
off the train & on the trail
The trail on this part of the mountain winds around small lakes, a section of petrified forest, a temple or shrine or three, ponds, bridges, waterfalls and the like. There are many places where enormous trees, hundred of years old, had been logged in the past. Their decaying stumps formed grotesque and beautiful sculptures, depending on your point of view and the tree’s.
When we reached Little Sister Lake and Big Sister Lake the fog had condensed into crystal droplets on the spider webs in the trees around the lake. Elsewhere it played tricks on the eye and ear, first obscuring a waterfall we could hear from the path, but not see, then lifting a few feet farther on to show us the same small waterfall. We wandered among wooden giants that had escaped the lumberjack’s blade, some as old as 1200 years. We viewed the “three generation tree”. A tree that had been felled, had a new tree rise from growth put out by the stump, then aged, fell and began to rot with a third start rising out of the remains of the second.
Big sister lake
pig stump
3 generation tree
We entered an ancient shrine that sat beside a small koi-filled lake where large, ghostly-white calla lilies hovered beside snags that had lifted themselves just above the water’s edge. Like all temples here, a huge incense burner, filled with dozens of sticks of incense sat in front of the entrance. The burners are almost always metal and stand usually six to eight feet tall. the center part is open and filled with sand or the ashes of thousands of sticks of incense that burned out there in the days, weeks and months prior. Inside were the usual old or young, wise-looking or warrior-appearing, male or female gods that are part of every temple here. Every surface inside and outside the temple is carved, embellished, painted, gilded or otherwise ornamented. But here the roof and eave carvings were dimmed and partially obscured by the fog.
calla lilies
We continued on, up a small rise and across a bridge where a small stream sang its way across rocks and waterfalls, disappearing into the fog below. We eventually found our way out onto a long wooden walkway that wound through the oldest and largest of the remaining ancient trees then led us back to the train station and thus down from the upper reaches to the parking lot where our car was now easy to find, as most of the people had departed into the fog and were no doubt wending their way down the mountain to their homes. And shortly we did likewise.
However, we did make a brief stop in a town about halfway down the mountain for dinner. In the back of the restaurant where we are there was a woman doing traditional Chinese embroidery. It’s a dying art and I just had to add a picture of her work-in-progress.
Traditional Chinese embroidery
slipstreamserendipity 