This is really a continuation of the day we went to Sun Moon lake (which I hope to get to soon…) I just decided to split the day into two separate posts.
After we left the lake we drove to Dongding for lunch. It was a pleasant drive through pretty countryside. There were (of course!) many temples and a couple of small parks along the way. Gogo Baba (note: this is a nickname that translates to “doggie daddy”, as he is very fond of dogs and rescues strays all the time), a local man who was driving us around that day, could not understand the interest I had in the temples. They are so much the part of the landscape here that most of the people who live here don’t even see them anymore. They just can’t figure out what’s so interesting about them that foreigners have such a fascination with them.
Park on the way to Dongding
Gogo Baba is also someone who knows everybody. Almost literally. After all, it’s a very small island nation and if you get around much you meet a lot of people. This guy has worked for the railway as an engineer for a long, long time. (The kind of engineer that fixes trains and solves problems, not the kind that drives the train.) He is also a lifeguard training instructor. Between those two things, and a host of other interests, he’s gotten to know a lot of people pretty well. And from what I saw, they all seem to love the guy.
One of the people he knows is a potter and sculptor who bought a bunch of land on top of a mountain in Dongding many years ago. This man and his wife built a hotel, restaurant, pottery studio and school and their home there. Now it’s a well-known destination in Taiwan. It may be off the beaten path, but a lot of people seem to know where it is when meal time rolls around. The food is good, the menu extensive and the portions generous. And the view is to die for. While you are dining you are gazing down the terraced hillsides at row after row of tea plants interspersed with the ubiquitous betel nut palms. Swallows of some sort and many other types of birds swoop and flit about the buildings. And in the hazy distance there are the valley towns.
Not in Kansas anymore Toto….
View from the deck
Sculpture on deck rail
After we ate we toured the pottery gallery and the studio. We went out on the brick patios and admired the views, the sculpture and the gardens. Along with the many types of flowers there were a lot of types of edibles growing. Everything from 3 types of eggplant, one of which is small, bumpy and orange to starfruit, tea and papaya, etc.
After we left Dongding, we drove around the area and visit a famous elementary school, built in Japanese style, saw a spider that is reputed to have a human-looking head (the ones we saw were too small for me to be able to see what their heads looked like…) and then visited a place called “Monster Village”. It was a strange little place (and I do mean little), set up on the side of a hill. Most of the buildings looked like something that came out of a fairy tale or The Hobbit. There were odd looking “monster” on rooftops and scattered about throughout the “village’. Some had stories behind them based in fable and lore, others were weird constructs of someone’s imagination.
big nose monster
As it wasn’t a large place, it didn’t take us long to see what there was to see and to walk through a few of the shops. I think it almost took longer to find a place to park than it did to see the place! But there were some good photo opp’s and the bird’s nest ferns that grew all over the place in the village were the largest I have ever seen. So it was worth the stop and rather fascinating.
Peeing baby fountain
Drunkard monsters
chimney monster
Gollum’s ugly brother
After we left Monster Village we stopped and had tea at the shop of another of Gogo Baba’s friends. A very upscale tea establishment that serves tea and coffee. It also has one of the only coffee roasting ovens in the area and small-scale growers of niche coffees bring their beans there to be roasted. Three different coffee farmers stopped by with bags of beans to be roasted while we were there.
What I really thought was interesting was the background music being played in the intimate and quite upscale tea and coffee house. Don McLean of the American Pie and Starry, Starry Night fame. His songs were in the background for the entire hour we were there. Which I found somewhat amusing as the only English speaking people in the place were my brother Brian and myself. Sure Gogo Baba can speak some, but only understands very much if you speak slowly and explain that words that aren’t common to him. So I doubt that he could catch much of the lyrics to the songs. Everyone else didn’t have a clue what they were about. But I guess music is universal, and pretty music is pretty music, even if you don’t know what is being said.
After we left there, Gogo Baba wanted to take us to yet another place for dinner, but I was pretty wiped out, so we begged off and had him take us home. He had a brief stop at another small shop as he was driving us back to Yuanlin, at the establishment of yet another friend, and came out with a bag of some kind of meat wrapped in a sticky dough made primarily of yams for us to take home for dinner. What a guy!
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