Taiwan: The Unexpected Port

Hey guys! As some of you know, I am actually back on land by this point. Our voyage ended the morning of the 24th. Its taken a while to say goodbye to people and take friends to the airport but things are beginning to calm down. Blog posts will end soon, but these last three or so will come in quick succession...anyway, on to Taiwan...

one of the famous "night markets." I ate a corndog off the street

"Life is an adventure. The universe brings me everything I need in the perfect time and in the perfect way."

“This Earth is not something we inherited from our parents, it is something we are borrowing from our children.”  - Awakening the Dreamer (look it up!)

Emily and I

So it turns out that there are some politics that prevent us from sailing directly from China to Taiwan. So we had to make a stop someplace else first. Guess where it was? Japan! The island we were at is Japanese owned, but it is the furthest one from the mainland. The place looked great and people were parasailing and rowing up to our boats all morning. We ended up staying there a few more hours than necessary because we drove over some poor guy’s fishing net and got it stuck in our propeller so divers had to go fish it out. Later that week we were circled by a Japanese coast guard helicopter, when we asked the captain about it, he said he was unaware.

It rained almost our whole first day in Taiwan but like the good sports we are we put on raincoats and sloshed our way to the train station to catch a train to Taipei. No one was super into it. Taiwan was feeling like our third version of China, plus we were exhausted. The highlight of the day was going up Taipei 101 to see the view. Taipei 101 in the second tallest building in the world right now, although it is probably about to be eclipsed. It was very foggy but we went up to the 90th something floor (in less than 40 seconds). We decided to take a nap up there before heading back down :)

a view from the top! look how small the cars are for reference

a few from the bottom

 After lunch our second day Jason and I went out with Ana and her mom to the Peace Garden and a Confucius Temple and then to an excellent dumpling restaurant. Then for desert we walked around the corner to a placed called Chocoholic that is a chocolate restaurant and I had a nutella crepe on a green-tea tortilla. We lastly headed back to Taipei 101 to see the view at night and Jason and I made it up for free. It was less foggy so the view was incredible.

the 101 at night

was this invented for me??

The next and final morning I had my final SAS trip to the Taroko Gorge which is about 2.5 hours away by train. It was a trip of about 40 people, but only 7 of us were students. We had the entire field office and media team, half the medical staff, LLCs and Life Long Learners. It was one of the better SAS trips I’ve done and I think it was because of the lack of students. I knew it was going to be a great day  when we all did the electric slide on the train platform in front of a number of confused Taiwanese people. We ate lunch at a hotel and I had the strangest meal of the whole trip: pasta, corn, carrots, pigs in a blanket and matzo balls. Our guide, who was a professor that was a volunteer for the tour organization, took us to many of the famous stops along the gorge, including the base of a 3000-meter cliff. Guess what? Turns out Toroko Gorge is another of the wonders of the world, just like Halong Bay which we tried so hard to make it to. The Universe provides...

my favorite photo of the bunch, this is the ship's photographer Brittney...can you see me in her lens?

from left to right: krista from the field office, Alyssa an LLC and Faith, MY LLC

I like this one too - we were all in awe

the couple holding hands is Betty and Boyd, the oldest people on the ship, they are almost 90

Me and bff Doctor Laura!

The ride back was long but we made it back for dinner (1.5 hours after on ship time, we were the last people out in port). I stayed out on the deck to watch our last international port disappear.

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We are now experiencing our 11 day Pacific crossing. An odd thing about this leg of the journey is the way it appears on the map on my cabin wall. I have spent so much time looking at that map, drawing a mental line across it and always using it to have a picture of where we are. In a few days, we will be sailing off the map. We will literally disappear off one side of it and re-appear on the other. On the map it looks like we are far from the states when we are actually pretty close and getting closer all the time. We experienced our very own Groundhog day when we crossed over the International Date Line. At midnight on April 12th we set our clocks back so that we woke up and it was still April 12th. Marty played “I Got You Babe” over the sound system to wish us a happy groundhog day. It took me all morning to figure out the reference.

We went slightly off course on our way to Hawaii; we had to move out of the waters we were on because there was missile-testing happening. Oh, the things that don’t make it onto the website or into the Voyage blog.

Last night we saw a light on the horizon. It was the first sign of human existence that we have seen in 10 days (although we did see birds when we got near the midway islands). We thought it was a ship but we later learned that it was a lighthouse. It is not to mark land, but rather a reef that is a danger to crossing ships. Hawaii two days out!!