Fieldwork along the Central Cross Island Highway

Four days of fieldwork in the mountains and thus escaping the heat and smog in Taipei sounded promising enough to attract not only ourselves and Kamil's brother Michi, who is currently visiting us, but also three others of our colleagues, Maryline, Vicky and Cha-Yi. So we set out last Sunday from Taipei and drove down to Tai Zhong. From there, we drove to the east into the mountians to Puli and further to Ren Ai, where we started looking at outcrops and studying the geology. Our first night, we spent in the area of Ching Jing (清境) at an altitude of about 1500 m. The clean and fresh air and the cool temperatures were very invigorating!!! What a change to Taipei! A bright and wonderful sunrise was greeting us on Monday morning:


We stayed in a very special hostel, the Villa Relax. The owners love their white Pyrenees dogs and - obviously - a lot of kitsch :-) . The whole area is very touristic, and developed around a sheep farm, which was started by a New Zealand couple. It is actually the only place in Taiwan, where you can see sheep. Funnily enough, all the hotels and hostels they built up there try to imitate an European style - littel castles, Schwarzwald houses and Dutch windmills are common sujets up here.


The view down is breathtaking - the steep topography covered in dense forest, agriculturally used terraces where only possible, beautiful mountain ridges, a bright clear sky and again - fresh air!!!


Kamil and Michi had a lot of fun fooling around and posing for photos:


Here is our whole group in front of He Huan Shan Dong Fen (3421m), one of the hundred mountain peaks in Taiwan, which are over 3000m.


And of course, we had to climb it!!!

After passing by the small town of Lishan, we drove down westward to the Deji reservoir and dam for some geologic investigations. The following panorama shows the steep topography to the north of the Central Cross Island Highway, just downstream of the Deji reservoir.


From the Deji Dam, we continued our journey by driving across Tayuling, Kuanyuan and down into the Taroko Gorge.

The absolutely fantastic scenery of the Taroko Gorge is enhanced by the great geology it has to offer and which we studied closely. Here you can see Kamil and Maryline engrossed in geologic discussions:


Again, fooling around in front of a camera:


On the last day, we arrived at the East Coast of Taiwan, which also greeted us with bright sunshine.




Temperatures there were much higher again and we honestly were thinking about fleeing back into the high mountains to escape the heat.

But Kamil's fieldwork plans included also some geologic stops at the coast, so we had to continue northwards. Advantage and drawback of being at lower elevations is the abundance of butterflies and spiders, respectively. Huge spiders, to be more precise...


Here is some more evidence, that we were really doing fieldwork, with Kamil showing some structural transport directions in the pre-Cenozoic Tananao Schist complex.

Maryline, of course, was rather reminded of Danse Tectonique, a new dance style in France! (This is a dance style performed initially by young French street performers in France and Belgium. It is usually done to electronic music such as techno or electro.)

Anyway, we had a great trip passing through wonderful landscape, which we luckily could combine with our work - privileged geologists as we are!