Today I went to Taroko Gorge, which was awesome. The weather was cooler and less humid than Taipei, although hiking was still tiring. We met up with a park ranger who has been conscientiously collecting samples for Niels for years, who took us to a fresh landslide which we spent several hours clambering over and sampling. Then I went for a walk up the gorge, and found this:
At the bottom are hot spring pools, the photo is taken from a rickety suspension bridge over the river.
Outward Journey
Wow, what a day. I awoke at 5.45 am, showered and dressed in plenty of time and arrived at the bus stop nice and early. Things were interesting from the off though, as I had to lend a woman a fiver so she could get on the bus. I was repaid a few minutes later when the driver stopped at a cash point. Why he couldn’t have just waited until that point to collect the erstwhile £5 I don’t know. Arriving at Heathrow at 10.00 for a 12.35 flight, I checked in swiftly and waved farewell to my baggage. Loading up on the usuals, Private Eye and whichever newspaper is giving away a free bottle of water, I settled down in the departure lounge and read happily. At the right time, the 100 or so people due to fly to Hong Kong all trooped down to the gate as normal. From then on, things were far from normal. Firstly, rather than a walkway to the plane, we were squeezed into buses and driven all the way across the terminal, through a tunnel to a little backwater and then up the stairs to the plane. Where we sat and waited. And waited. Eventually the in flight entertainment was switched on, but still no word about whether we would be leaving. Assuming a reasonably short delay, I started watching Sherlock Holmes on the basis that it would be reasonably trashy and I could pause halfway through without losing the plot. Two hours later and I’d finished that, and my magazines. At last, an announcement – the engineers were working on the plane, but had ordered the wrong part. More waiting, and eventually the part arrived. But it still didn’t fix the problem and the annoucement came over that we were to be “deplaned”, as soon as they could get some buses over to pick us up. An hour later we were on our way back to the terminal, each clutching a letter entitling us to £15 worth of food in the terminal restaurants. This was at 4pm, and was to be the first thing I had eaten since breakfast at 7.
Wolfing down a positively mediocre lasagne, I heard a garbled announcement on the PA which might have related to us – I shoved my chocolate fudge cake (dry, with a texture best described as “plastique”) into my mouth and trotted over to the boards to find that there was a new gate available for our flight. Not knowing when we were to leave, I charged over and got onto the plane, now miraculously operational apparently. However, rapid take-off was stymied by the fact that there were 100 hungry, angry people milling around in the terminal, some of whom were still queueing to eat dinner, many of whom didn’t speak english, and all of whom unable to understand the terrible PA. We took off at 7.10, six and a half hours late.
I wrote that from Hong Kong airport, twelve boring, uncomfortable and sleep-deprived hours later, about to board my re-arranged connection to Taipei.
Which didn’t happen. After boarding, waiting for a bunch of people who got lost and finally being ready to leave, the doors broke and wouldn’t close. So we “deplaned” again, and have returned to the departure lounge to get a different plane to Taipei. It’s now 27 hours since I awoke, I dozed for about an hour on the plane and it will be a good four hours until I get to my hotel in Taipei, assuming of course that they haven’t given me up as a bad job and cancelled my booking.
2100 Taipei time, 31 hours after my bus departed from Cambridge:
And I’ve finally arrived in my hostel. The second flight to Taipei went without a hitch, and I’ve successfully cleared immigration. I caught a bus to the main city train station, thinking that the airport was out of the city but not too much, only to find that it was a 30km ride in the rain. Good job I didn’t go for the taxi approach, although I guess the fare would have been covered on expenses. Seeing the gridlock around the station I took the metro to the right stop, and am now the proud owner of their version of an oyster. The Taipei Easycard is cheap (40p for a single journey) and can be used to pay for shopping up to £25 and government services. There is one last nail in the coffin for this journey unfortunately, putting my luggage on and off four planes has caused one of the wheels on my holdall to snap, meaning it now kind-of drags behind me rather than rolling. Combining this with the plentiful puddles on the streets tonight and I’ve got some drying to do.
Fun times
xx
Just a quick picture this time, before breakfast. Here’s something from the Museum of Fine Arts.
Today’s photo: Hungarian Parliament. Modelled on Westminster it’s the world’s third largest parliament building. I woke up at 7 to queue for tickets for a free guided tour, and it was well worth it.
My trusty Sony V1 camera is about 6 years old now, and the batteries have had it. So I bought a new camera, and have been running around Budapest trying it out. As you do. It’s a Sony a-500 DSLR which seems to be fun, if complicated.
I’ve shunned the traditional tourist highlights for the time being, although there are still a few days to go the the relevant museums etc. I’ve found that museums have fairly awkward photography rules, mostly that they advertise a photography price at the entrance but refuse to let you take pictures anyway… Zoos and botanical gardens have none of that nonsense, so I could play with the camera to my heart’s content.
Many photos will follow I’m sure, but here is a taster 
Unfortunately we’ve been stung by the exchange rate – I took out my travel money last Thursday and since then Hungary has had debt problems and the exchange rate has got 15% better. Luckily most things are still pretty cheap here – £1 a pint in most bars and £2 for bottle of wine from a supermarket
We made it to Southwold on our bicycle jaunt. Not as quickly as hoped for, due to multiple bike-related delays, but we made it. There were disintegrating bicycle pumps, punctures, chains coming off, setting off issues, steering issues and then general “we’ve cycled 40 miles and it hurts” issues. Unfortunately my photojournalism skills are atrocious, most of the more interesting moments were spent with me covered in oil and swearing rather than taking pictures of said activity, and so you’ve missed out 
I do have a couple of pictures, including proof that we made it there:
The only problem with our arrival was that it was 10 minutes after the town shut up shop for the afternoon, so we missed out on our fish and chips. This was after cycling past five open shops already that day. We were further tortured by having to zoom past a further five on the way home, when all we could do was stop for a quick drink of water.
If there’s one complaint I must raise about Cambridge, it’s the dearth of fish and chip shops anywhere near the town centre. This is a problem we’ve had to deal with since the first year, and wasn’t even alleviated when we lived out for a year in the north of the city – the nearest shop there was of dubious quality at best. Well, good news! As I walked down the the train station to come home for Easter, what should I spot but a shiny new shopfront on Regent Street, looking incredibly like a chippy. It’s still being renovated, far too soon for Google Street View to catch up, but there is hope at least.
However, the promise of some possibly decent chips in a few months isn’t quite good enough, and so I’ve decided to take things into my own hands. This friday, Mark and I will be cycling by tandem to Southwold for some fish, chips, and possibly a beer. Mark’s going to be the powerhouse, but due to extenuating circumstances we’ll let him off the steering (most of the time at least). Mark is blind, but sometimes you’d be hard-pressed to realise. He is currently studying for an MSci at Hatfield College, Durham, rows in the college First VIII, is a member of the MCR committee and lived out in a house with friends for a year, looking after himself. When you see both the range of activities that could have been problematic for him, and the number of techniques he has developed to get around them, it’s inspirational.
I’ve planned a route on the GPS, about 48 miles all told wihich should be nicely manageable with the two of us. Mapping services for GPS devices generally consist of you buying a £150 handheld gizmo, then £100+ for each country’s roads. This is somewhat expensive, so I’ve been involved with the OpenStreetMap project, which is an attempt to make a copyright-free map of the UK. The method is is quite cunning. Tracing maps from other sources is legally dubious, so what happens instead is that people track themselves as they walk/run/cycle/drive around their local roads, and then upload these GPS tracks to a central server. They, or someone else, can then trace over the route they took and draw in the roads. Thus the location of the roads in the new map isn’t dependent on any other datasource. Whilst this generates a map which is at times is at least as good as Google Maps and can be edited instantly when things change, in places where people haven’t done the groundwork the coverage is poor. Thus out in the sticks here there was a whole one road going through Loddon, I’ve been busily cycling around fixing that. The bonus of free data is that you can transfer it, in my case downloading a version formatted for my Garmin GPS. The whole world is available, in varying states of completeness, the only price is a little tinkering time copying them to the GPS unit.