When many think of Taiwan, images of grand scale factories pumping all manner of goods that receive the" Made in Taiwan" tags come to mind. But venture out of the bustling metropolis of Taipei, down the mountainous eastern shore of the island and one marvel after another unfolds before you.





As the high speed train pulls out of Taipei station, it leaves behind the world's tallest building, the 101-story Taipei 101. It rolls southward past water-soaked rice fields being turned over by man and ox. The contrast presented by mounting a train for 30 minutes is stunning.


Before I can absorb the change from city to farmland, another vista is painted through the train windows: the magnificent coastline. Our appetites for scenery are wet by the time we disembark three hours later in Hualien. We rent a couple of motorbikes and continue down the scenic road hugging the coastline towards Taitung. Dramatic mountains of marble covered by lush vegetation plunge from great heights straight down into the ocean, which pounds them relentlessly with waves that throw up enormous splashes as they meet.



The road's mere existence along the vertical rock and beside the tsunami-battered shore is impressive. Sometimes seeming to hang right off the edge of the island, sometimes plowing right through solid rock, the roads and tunnels we traveled on two wheels granted us a view of Taiwan's grandiose, and often overlooked beauty.



Hungry for more, we plan a trek through Taroko Gorge, which we hear is a gem and among the world's most scenic spots. After a night's rest in Hualien, we hop back on the scooters and head for the train station to return them and catch a bus north to Tienshiang, a small town most of the way up the gorge. Only my normally good sense of direction failed us. We ended up who knows where, lost without the slightest sense of where we were or which direction the station was.

Aggravating the situation was the fuel tank indicator on Joanne's bike. It was so far below the empty line that it wasn't even remotely associated with the scale anymore. But in a time crunch to catch the bus, we decide to push on. I "ask" a fellow motorist stopped at a light, shrugging my shoulders, wrists together, palms up: "choo! choo!", then making a revolving piston motion with my arms. Thankfully, he answers my pantomime with surprisingly good English. Unfortunately, he asks: "Which town's station?" Sadly, we weren't even in Hualien anymore.!

Remarkably for us, but typical for the overwhelmingly hospitable attitude the Taiwanese have towards visiting foreigners, he stops his journey and escorts us back in the opposite direction through a maze of similar looking streets and alleys for 15 minutes until we're back at the Hualien train station. This helpful and often curious attitude was repeated again and again as we navigated, often stumbling with effective illiteracy, deafness and muteness from the language barrier.

With minutes to spare, we pull into the bike rental shop, come to a stop, and Joanne's putt-putt puts out its last putt and dies, out of gas. Amazing.

We hurry to the ticket counter, buy two tickets to Tienshiang and board the bus. Setting our packs at our feet, we begin to reminisce about yesterday's outstanding experience riding the scooters down and up the coast, stopping here and there to check out whatever called to us. And then it hit us... What are we doing on a bus!? We need to make the journey into the gorge on bikes! Disembarking just as the bus was to pull out, we make our way back to the ticket counter, where they exchange our tickets for cash, which we exchange again for our trusty two wheeled adventure-mobiles.

And so we cruise to and through the stunning gorge on a narrow road hugging one side or another of the meandering . base of the deeply eroded canyon system. Cut over millennia by frothy whitewater inevitably pouring from mountaintop to sea, it exposes wonders: To our sides stand near-vertical slopes of exposed marble with unlikely but plentiful trees squeezing through the cracks, some of whose roots can be seen tracing a path downward over the rocks into another crack. There are thick moss-covered areas where water oozes out seemingly from solid rock and patches of jade to delight the eyes.


Hours of awe ensue as we climb, crossing a dozen bridges and traversing a dozen tunnels drilled out from solid rock wherever neither side could hold a road or where recurring landslides bury efforts to shape this wild space into a motorist pass under heaps of rocks and boulders.

The balmy weather we began with at its mouth where it pours into the sea changes to crisp mountain air as we rise up, and up and up. Along the way, we are passed by several busses zipping past all the goodies that we stopped to admire. We soon realized that their stops were defined not by their beauty, but by the road engineer's ability to make a parking area for buses, where they and a hundred others would briefly snap photos and move on. That was almost us.

We bed dreamily that night in Tienshiang, blessed by our tendency to follow our instincts. An early dawn hike up to one of the many nearby peaks - whose trailhead had no bus parking - topped the experience off with a clan of howler monkeys and literally breathtaking vistas (or was that the steep unrelenting climb?). Back in town, with wonderfully sore muscles, we sip enough oolong tea to warm our weary bones, and then got to ride the winding roads all over again in reverse, enjoying it much more than any rerun we've ever seen.