To Taiwan and Back Again...: paragliding

Showing posts with label paragliding. Show all posts

Sunday, April 29, 2012

A Year to the Day

April 28th marked the anniversary of Amanda and my arriving in Taiwan. It is strange to think that 365 days have passed by so quickly and even stranger to to think that our teaching contracts will finish in a little over 100 days.

To mark the milestones of being so far and yet so close to home, we decided to post something of a retrospective to cover our most memorable moments, most and least favorite things about Taiwan, as well as what we are most eagerly anticipating about returning to Canada. (As it’s a lot of ground to cover, I’ll be helping him out with this one - A) Here goes...

Most Memorable Moments

1. Dragon Boat Festival

This was our first taste of Taiwanese holiday spirit. We never would have known about it if we hadn’t happened to walk along the Love River just a few days before (on one of our many trips to Carrefour looking for sheets, no doubt!) The brightly coloured boats, the snacks, the crowds, and the beautiful weather all made for a perfect long weekend.

2. Xiao Liuqiu

Almost one year later, Xiao Liuqiu remains one of my favorite memories. Our friend Stanley booked our accommodation which was a huge help because the hotel staff were very apprehensive about communicating with us when they discovered the guests that they were expecting were non-Chinese speaking foreigners. In spite of their apprehension, the hotel was great and the staff were really friendly. We lucked out with the weather and the views were spectacular. Although we suffered a little for the blue skies - I think Amanda had at this point already endured one or two of my midday sun +30C “death marches” but she was still finding them insufferable. Despite our lobster-red sun burns, Amanda agrees that it was all worthwhile for Xiao Liuqiu.

3. Singaopore

On our visit to Singapore this summer, we experienced some of the hottest weather, the friendliest hosts, and the most overpriced cocktails we’ve enjoyed all year. We spent time with our then-landlord’s family as well as with the family of a good friend and colleague of Brett’s. We tasted durian, visited one of the best zoos in the world, took a cable car over the city - and I held a lethal snake. All in a day’s work!

4. Taipei 101 (台北101 / 臺北101)

Taipei’s most recognizable landmark is Taipei 101. The building apparently stood as the world’s tallest from 2004 until the opening of the Burj Kalifa in 2010. Some of my favorite photos taken in Taiwan, have been taken from the observation deck of Taipei 101, and from a lookout on Elephant Mountain (re-posted below). I sincerely hope I have the opportunity to return to that lookout one last time before we leave Taiwan, for a sunrise perhaps.

5. Paragliding in Puli

Our paragliding trip to celebrate a friend’s birthday couldn’t have gone better. We enjoyed a night in a quaint, rural cabin, and spent the next day relaxing in the mountains of Puli while each of our party took turns soaring overhead. Brett absolutely loved it, and has been pestering me to get back out there this summer!

6. Chinese New Year Banquet

Amanda and I were very fortunate to be invited to join our good friend Stanley and his family to celebrate Chinese New Year’s Eve and the start to the Year of the Dragon. CNY is the biggest holiday in Taiwan and so we were lucky to have a full week off work, during which we returned to Kaohsiung. It was a great cultural experience and we are really grateful for the hospitality that was shown to us by Stanley’s family.

7. Lantern Festival

We celebrated the Lantern Festival both in Taichung and in Kaohsiung with my mom during her short visit to Taiwan. We saw tons of beautiful lanterns, watched a lengthy and impressive fireworks display, and visited with friends we rarely get to see - all while enjoying a very comforting visit from my mom!

8. Friends we made

About one month after arriving in Taiwan, Amanda and I decided to attempt to make some new friends via advertising for a “language exchange” on a classifieds website popular amongst foreigners living in Taiwan. We were both a little apprehensive and nervous prior to first meeting the people who we would later become good friends with. We both considered, “what if they turn out to be crazy?” and perhaps the same was wondered of us. As it turned out, the friends we made were probably the best experience we have had in Taiwan.

Friday, November 4, 2011

One Thousand Meters Up

I thought I would add a short post of my own to describe my paragliding experience in Puli. We were told that the first person of our group to go should be one of the lightest because the thermals would only just be kicking up and hence if you have too much weight then you will end up at the bottom of the mountain needing to be picked up and driven back up the hill.

The second person to go should be one of the biggest because if the sun is out then the thermals will quickly pick up and you actually want your total weight (instructor and passenger) to be as heavier. I qualified as the candidate for this task and so was second of our group to take to the skies. I’m not sure if Yuri (our instructor) is permanently elated when he is in the sky, but he suggested that the conditions were perfect and that we were very lucky. At one point an altitude meter that beeped at different rates depending on the speed of your ascent sounded like the electrocardiogram of a rabbit while mating. Yuri told me that we were climbing at more than 3 meters/second and he was very excited about this.

At our highest we were more than 1,600 meters above sea level and just over 1,000 meters above where we had launched. Upon reaching our zenith we were amongst the “solos”, as Yuri called them, and there was only one para-glider in the sky higher than us.

On our way back down Yuri asked if I wanted to try going into a descending spin as I could see other para-gliders performing. Naturally I answered with the affirmative. The g-forces on the way down were incredible and I very much imagined my face to look like that of a dog with its head out of a car window covered in slobber that is spraying into the wind. I sincerely hope I didn’t slobber on Yuri!

We shot long on our first landing attempt and so had to circle around and gain back some altitude, but then we successfully landed on our second attempt.

It was an amazing amazing experience and I can definitely see myself return again while we are in Taiwan.


Amanda took this picture of me during my climb. Yuri and I were in the yellow-green-chute.

Monday, October 31, 2011

Paragliding in Puli

This weekend, to celebrate our friend’s 30th birthday, we went on a camping and paragliding trip to Puli, a town (pop. 86,000) about an hour’s bus ride into the mountains from Taichung City. Boje and I met at my branch on Saturday afternoon after I’d finished teaching for the day, then took a cab to the Nantou Bus Company counter at Taichung City Station (台中干城站). It was the same bus company that took us to Sun Moon Lake, and it was only NT$125 per person (one way) out to Puli. We were dropped off at Nantou Bus’ Puli terminal and took a taxi up a winding mountain road to the campground where we’d be flying from the next day.

The campground was so lovely and located in a large clearing on the mountainside. There was a huge patio with a sort of outdoor kitchen/snack shack where our group of 10 was served an all-you-can-eat BBQ feast under the stars. We had chicken steak (ji pai), chicken wings, chicken butts (or the “Parson’s nose”, as Boje calls it), chicken skin, steamed vegetables with ginger, and a tofu/fish ball soup. Boje and I also had some skewered BBQ chicken hearts. The verdict: chewy, and tasting slightly of blood.

Some of the people we were with were camping in tents there for the night, but we paid an extra NT$200 per person to share a cute cabin with three other people about 20 minutes away. We all celebrated our friend’s birthday well into the night, and a little while after midnight the five of us staying in the cabin decided to call a cab. Turns out no local drivers drivers wanted to come up dark switchbacks in the middle of the night, so the lady running the kitchen drove three of us down the mountain while my friend and another girl followed behind us on a scooter. I reached the bottom with Boje and the birthday boy, but the girls had experienced some scooter engine trouble and were delayed getting down. Once the five of us had all met up at a beautiful park at the bottom of the road, we made our way to a 7/11 (Taiwan’s 24-hour cab stand) and called a taxi. The driver seemed to know where to go (based on gesturing, our yammering in English and his banter in Chinese, and lots of pointing at a map of the area) so we headed out. The taxi driver missed a turn and so we were flagged down by the girls. A Taiwanese man at a nearby gas station was consulted for a second opinion, and after much shouting (not in anger, but in the tired, confused way of people trying to overcome a severe language barrier) we were back on the road. There were several more false starts, but we finally made it to our destination at around 2 in the morning. In typical Taiwanese fashion, rather than be a jerk and charge us extra for the hassle, the cab driver halved our previously agreed fare AND gave us his card so we could call him in the morning, because I’m reasonably sure he thought no other taxi driver in Puli would know how to find us again. We collapsed into our tiny cabin and all passed out promptly to the sound of chirping crickets, croaking frogs, and snoring boyfriends.

In the morning we (slowly) got up and headed back up to the campsite to meet up with the rest of our party who’d stayed in tents. Around 11, an awesome South African paragliding pilot named Yuri as well as some Taiwanese pilots he knew showed up and we started flying!

Boje was the second in our group to go and I was so terrified/impressed the whole time he was up there. He entrusted me with the “big lens” so I was able to get some photos. Every time the pilot brought him down near us, the whole group on the ground could see Boje’s huge grin. I had a momentary panic attack at one point, though, when the pilot was trying to land the chute and we heard him yell “Shit!” as the parachute continued down the mountain. He'd just missed the landing, which seemed like a pretty normal situation all day as the winds picked up. All was well, and they landed gently on the following circle. My own trip was less successful. It wasn’t scary at all - you feel completely safe up there. The guy who organized the trip for us aptly described the experience as “like sitting in a big glove in the sky”. My only problem was the crippling motion sickness. I made one circle and was feeling okay, but about halfway around the next lap I exclaimed “Bu hao! Bu hao!” (No good!) and insisted with the few Chinese words I could muster that we needed to land. Once I was safely on the ground I still felt queasy for about an hour.

After everyone had flown, about half of us headed back to Taichung on the Nantou bus, and the other half took scooters. Those of us on the bus took a cab to an amazing restaurant in town called Uzo Bar and Grill. Wow. I hadn’t had a chicken gyro wrap like that in a long time. None of us had eaten since breakfast, and we all devoured our wraps, burgers, pizza, desserts, and cold drinks. It was the perfect ending to an awesome weekend. Boje absolutely loved paragliding, and is already thinking about when we’ll be able to go again. Sounds nice, dear - enjoy your flight. I’ll be the speck on the ground kneeling over a bucket.

For prospective paragliders:

If you'd like to try paragliding in Puli, contact Steve or Yuri from Step Out in Taiwan. They're on Facebook and offer a bunch of different scooter tours and packages on their website. They did all the bookings and arranged everything with the cooks at the campground as well as told us exactly where to go, so we had an awesome overnight stay and very safe paragliding experience for under NT$4000 per person (including meals and bus fares).