Escaping the heat

By now, temperatures in Taipei regularly climb well above 30C already before noon. They also rarely drop below this mark before midnight. Physical activities are best done in the morning hours or after sunset. With all its buildings and streets, the city's capacity to store additional heat makes the temperatures hardly bearable at times. We were therefore very glad when Y-Rong invited us to go camping with her friends out in the woods in the mountains south of Taipei for the last weekend.
The following map shows the location of our campsite as a blue placemark. The valley we went into follows a tributary stream of the Wulai River, which drains through the village of Wūlái (烏來), south of Taipei City.


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When you look at the surroundings of our campsite, you readily see how green and remote the place is. What a relief from the big city! If you follow the small road upstream (to the east) you will see that it continues towards the water divide, from where you can descend down to the town of Ilan.
While Micha went comfortably by car together with Y-Rong and most of her friends, Kamil had the stubborn idea to go there by bike together with Y-Rong's boyfriend Y-Sheng. The two set out at 7:00 AM. The first part was easy, taking the city's metro line down to Xindian at the southern edge of town. Then they cycled upstream towards Wulai. In Wulai, the road goes off to the east into a narrow tributary valley of the Wulai River. The campsite is located some 15 km further upstream. The later it got, the hotter it got. Y-Sheng could cope with the heat much better than Kamil, who looked much more desperate than Y-Sheng on this picture.


Funnily, the two brave cyclists still made it to the campsite a good hour earlier than the rest of the group who drove there by car. In the early afternoon, our group was complete and everybody enjoyed the rest of the day being out in the green.


Y-Rong and Y-Sheng were also happily reunited:



We had a delicious 3-course supper, comprising a Japanese miso-soup, noodles and pudding as well as Micha's chocolate cookies for dessert. Plus three highly valued cans of Sapporo-beer that Kamil brought in his luggage by bike. He seems to still have been hungry, though:

... whereas Micha's reaction to this green stickinsect was startled fascination rather than appetite:


Here we see two proud engineers who found a workaround for a missing outer tent.

Fortunately, their engineering skills were unnecessary. It stayed dry all night and the next day greeted us with sunshine:

Correspondingly, everybody's mood was splendid.


A perfect weekend! You can view the rest of the pictures on our Picasaweb Album.