So I’m riding home, everything is going swimmingly. I’ve got my ipod on (although I like to call it my sipod) listening to some banging tunes, and the wind is blowing a really nice refreshing breeze. It’s basically all spot on until my scooter reaches ground zero* where it then gives out a massively loud “MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO” and stops dead.

***************

*I live in a place called Yuanlin and work in a different place called Beidou, they’re about a 20 to 30 minute scooter ride apart. A place equidistant between both of these is ground zero.

***************

I coast on my scooter to the side of the road, try to re-start the engine but there’s no joy so I get off and put her onto her stand. “Hmm…”, I rub my chin and ponder, “It sounds like she’s turning over when I press the ignition but she’s not firing” (I don’t know a load about auto mechanics but I’ve tinkered with bits in the past). Luckily I keep a screw driver in my scooter (A Taiwanese man gave it me once when he saw me trying to fix my brakes with a swiss army knife) so I get it out and undress my scooter a bit. To confirm my suspicions I find a lead (I think they call it a high tension lead), that is supposed to go to my scooter’s spark plug, (well I presume it was the HT lead and that its supposed to go to my spark plug but I’m not 100% positive). All I need to do now is put it back on my spark plug.

Where is my spark plug?

I spend a few minutes poking around looking for the spark plug but can’t find it. I begin to doubt myself and think perhaps this wire has always dangled about, and even if it was the spark plug at fault why on earth did it moo? And perhaps the spark plug is on the other side of the engine behind all that plastic chassis and I’m just pissing in the dark (it was dark, I wasn’t pissing but I did need to go).

They don’t have the AA or the RAC here but they do have Uncle scooter. I decided to give in and pushed my scooter to the nearest 7 - eleven, so I could take a piss, and then give Uncle a ring. He said to wait where I am and he’ll come and help me so I sat down and had a coffee and a hot dog.

About 15 minutes later, sure enough, Uncle arrives on his scooter. I tell him what happened and he takes a look.
“Simon”, he says, “Where is your spark plug?”
“I couldn’t find where it’s supposed to be either”, I say back.
“I know where it’s supposed to be, but it’s not there” Says Uncle whilst pointing to an empty hole.
“Bugger” I say.

The spark plug must have been loose and the pressure in the engine must have launched it onto the road somewhere. I suppose that explains why my scooter moooed at least – all the air in the engine being forced out of the hole where the spark plug used to live.  Explanations, however, won’t get me home so I walked back up the road to ground zero in search of my spark plug.

Maybe it was an event inexplicable by the laws of nature or maybe it was a car headlight, but my spark plug sat there in the middle of the dark and dirty road, twinkling at me. I waited for a gap in traffic and grabbed it. With the spark plug in one hand, held high above my head like some kind of trophy, and a big grin on my face I quickly headed back to Uncle.

We put the spark plug right back in it’s hole and fired the baby up. She starts first time. I restrain myself; don’t want to get too excited just yet as we’ve only managed to screw the plug in a little bit using our fingers.

She cuts out.

We try putting the plug in again, this time with a little more success - and a little more pain; the scooters started to heat up a bit since we got her ticking over. It wasn’t a perfect fix but fingers crossed it’ll get me and the scooter back to Uncle’s garage.

I set off with Uncle closely following behind. Carefully I weave in-between the rickety roads exposed man hole covers, pot holes and other hazards resulting from earthquakes (and shoddy workmanship) of years passed. We make good time and it looks like it’s going to be a success when:

“Mooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo”.

She does it again. The spark plug flies out of my scooter and lands in the middle of the road. I pull over to the side and get off, Uncle does the same. A gigantic truck drives straight over the spark plug and flips it into the air where it appears to twirl elegantly like a ballerina in mid air before landing in the path of two more oversized family cars. It was as if it knew it’s fate already and wanted to go out with one last dance. As soon as there is a break in the traffic I quickly run out and, too hot to pick up, I flick the spark plug to the side of the road.

Uncle grabs my arm and says, “leave it Simon, I’ll push you from here”.
“Push me?” “Don’t be silly!” “We’re a good 2 kms away from you garage!” I say.
“You have to trust me” he replies.

I hesitate but agree. Something about his voice tells me he’s right despite how absurd I think he’s being so I got on my scooter like he tells me and turn on my lights. Uncle gets on his scooter, sticks his right leg in front of him and drives straight for me. The next thing I know I’m moving and at a good pace too. He pushes me until I’m up to about 40km/hr and then he drops back as I weave, freewheeling, through some slow moving traffic, just as I’m running out of momentum there he is again with his foot to get me moving.

Needless to say we were back in no time. Uncle got me a new spark plug from his store, we fitted it - using actual tools - and the job was a good’n. What’s more is he refused to accept any money for his time and efforts and would only take money off me to the sum of 200TWD (the cost of the spark plug). Uncle scooter is a living legend and without doubt the nicest man in Taiwan. Fact. Here’s a picture of him:

 Thanks Uncle Scooter!

We decided it would be nice to splash out and have it all sorted for us by greenislandadventures.com. So we did, and it was.

Here’s the story of our green island adventure:

Thursday 9^th / Friday 10^th April

We got the train to Taichung and then got the night bus from Taichung to Taitung, this bus departed at 11.20pm and took about 6 hours so we got some kip. We woke up at about 5.30 am, when the bus driver wanted us off his bus, and sat on the nearest bench at the side of the road. The reason we’d decided to pay a bit extra for the trip was because we didn’t want to have to think, and think we did not, we didn’t even think to ask what the logistics of the trip were. So we sat and we waited and we didn’t think some more and eventually a taxi pulled up with a little sign saying Simon. Excellent. We got in the taxi and he took us to the ferry port in Taitung.

Whilst we were waiting for our ferry we decided to do a puzzle but since we still weren’t thinking Debbie had to ask for help from a 6 year old girl.

The ferry ride (ride is definitely the right word here – It was like being on the pirate ship at Alton Towers) there was filled with the sounds of people throwing up and the stench that comes with it. I needed a wee but didn’t really want to go in the toilets so instead went to sleep.

A little bit later we arrived at the island, a man with a minivan was waiting for us and holding a sign that read “Simon”. Sweet. He took us to our hotel and gave us a room and a scooter! Our hotel was called Jacks, here’s a map of the island: 

The island isn’t very big, you can easily drive a full loop around it in about 30 minutes on a scooter and we had the best part of three days.

To start with we went to the lighthouse, here’s a picture of me with it:

The 33 metre high lighthouse was built after an American ship ran aground in the coral reefs around Green Island back in the 1930s. I think the Americans even paid for it.

Next we went and had a look at some caves over on the north east of the island and found a cave goat. We got some food, had a look at some old gun turrets and then headed over to the hot springs on the south of the island. Here’s a picture of the hot springs:

These hot springs aren’t just your run of the mill hot spring, oh no, they are one of only three, known, salt water hot springs in the world. The WORLD!

We spent most of the rest of the evening relaxing in salty, sulphur water and it was great!

Saturday 11^th April

In an attempt to see the sun rise over the pacific ocean we got up at 5am, pulled on our clothes, got on our scooter – stopped at a 7/11 for chocolate milk and oreos – and drove around to the eastern side of the island. Here’s a picture of my wrist watch to prove the time:

It’s not very often you’re sitting on a small island out on the Pacific Ocean at such a silly hour so we figured a celebration was probably due and got out a bottle of champagne we’d been carrying around just in case such a scenario ever occurred. Here’s Debbie opening the champagne:

When I took the picture I thought it was just my eyes out of focus - due to not being awake properly, my eyes do usually focus themselves -  but it would appear that the photo is also out of focus – my camera is supposed to focus itself but sometimes doesn’t.

After yet another failed attempt at seeing a sun rise (I’m beginning to lose faith in the sun) we headed back to our hotel and got a few more hours sleep before driving to the summit of the island.

We couldn’t get to the actual summit because it was owned by the military and trespassing didn’t seem like a very clever idea considering what the consequences could be, but we did find a nice hiking trail and did that instead. On the trail we must have seen at least a thousand lizards - seriously I’m not exaggerating. Also, and I’m still not exaggerating, there were spiders as big as your head. Well ok I’m exaggerating a little bit unless you have a tiny head, which I don’t. But anyways, these spiders were massive and we were lucky we didn’t get caught in their webs. Here’s one of the spiders we had to leg it passed:

After the hike we went snorkelling but not before we’d eaten some raw fish to re-affirm our position in the food chain.

I don’t recall ever going snorkelling before so probably never have but I will definitely go again now that I’ve seen what I’ve been missing all these years. I don’t have any pictures to show you as my camera isn’t waterproof but I can assure you it was amazing. I must admit I was a bit freaked out when the snorkelling instructor gave us our crappy snorkels and a leaf to clean the manky mouth piece with but I soon forgot what I was biting down on once I saw the fish, they were like rainbows and some of them had tools (like a saw and a hammer) for their head!

Sunday 12^th April

Green Island was the home to three prisons (they’re still there but they don’t have any prisoners in them, one might actually, but the other two don’t, and without prisoners they’re basically buildings hence why I said “was the home” and not “is the home”. Anyway we decided to visit the prisons, sorry buildings, to experience a bit of the islands history and, obviously, because of morbid curiosity.

Oasis villa (1972 – 1987) was the main one open to the public and was once home to many political prisoners. I don’t know a lot about it so won’t pretend to and instead will show you a picture of it, here is a picture of it:

We had a wonder around a few more sites such as the Human Rights Monument dedicated to the people held in the islands prisons, went to the deer park and stroked some little dears (oh dear I just made a deer joke). And then went to the beach to chill out for a while before starting the long journey home. Apparently I had a sleep too.

Unfortunately Debbie didn’t.

*In order to buy a scooter in Taiwan you’re supposed to be a resident, neither Debbie nor I am so we had to find a Taiwanese person kind enough to let us use their name…. It was surprisingly easy. We promise not to get you any speeding tickets!! :p

Here she is:

Fastest scooter in the east! Here she is in slow motion:

She’s a Yamaha Fnsgter (that’s not a typo) 125cc.

So we loaded her up with me and Debbie, all our camping stuff for a week, and filled her petrol tank up to the brim (which cost about £3 pounds), then set off.

100% pure excitement:

And here’s a map roughly showing our route:

Map stolen from Lonely planet - Sorry

We live in a place called Yuanlin which is just a bit south of Changhua, from there we headed south Kenting. This journey took us two days, I can’t remember the name of the place we stopped to rest on the first night but here’s a picture of us all at the campsite:

 We spent two nights in Kenting during which time we did some relaxing on the beach, ate lots of food,  had a firework display and rode a tiny little bike round in circles. Here’s a picture of us both on the beach:

We came out of the incident with only a few scrapes, a swollen elbow, a ripped jacket and a broken indicator cover.. oh yeah and about 20 quid. The mental guy got out of his car, shouted at us and then gave us the equivalent of about 20 quid before driving off.

Poor jacket L:

 We spent the night a little bit further north than Taitung besides a beach and whilst setting up our tents were approached by two (very very gay) Japanese tourists (perhaps we’d accidently stumbled across the local dogging spot?) who wanted to take our pictures with them:

The next day we drove all the way to the Taroko national park and the Taroko gorge (which the park was named after). Driving through the gorge was incredible, here’s a video of it although it doesn’t really do it justice due to the wall in the way.

We camped in a free campsite in the gorge and spent the next day doing some fairly tame hikes (being careful not to stumble across any killer bees or poisonous snakes mind) and found a very nice hot spring with a temperature of about 45ºC; here’s a picture of us all in it:

Apparently Taiwan is ranked as one of the world’s top hot spring locations and from this spring I could see why. It was two small pools full of very hot geothermal heated water next to a freezing cold river and since access to it had been closed, due to landslides, we had it pretty much to ourselves J.

 The next day we set off up the mountain roads from the gorge, the roads kept going higher and higher and before long we were above the clouds and it got really foggy and the temperatures dropped to below freezing. The roads were so steep that at one point Debbie had to get off the scooter and walk at the side of me. Finally we reached the highest point “3275 meters” the highest I’ve ever been and we did it all on a scooter!! 

From here we pushed on back to Yuanlin but not before stopping off at the world’s highest Starbucks to warm up.

News update:

Hopefully our next trip will be a little more comfortable as we now have a second scooter:

The satelite image of Weizhou island is a screen shot from NASA’s globe software “World Wind”.

Unfortunately the weather there wasn’t that great so our days on the beach weren’t exactly how we’d pictured them:

On the plus side there were lots and lots and lots of banana trees so we went scrumping and came back with about 75 bananas:

We also found a round yellow fruit as big as Debbie’s head:

For New Years Eve we bought a shit load of fishy stuff and had a big barbeque accompanied by copious amounts of alcohol. Then on the stroke of midnight we lit a load of fireworks on the beach, unfortunately it was quite windy and they didn’t actually go off at midnight, instead we had to make a few modifications to the fuses (:s) and had our firework display about 10 minutes late… It was still way before you guys back in England though!!

Christmas Eve

We spent most of our Christmas Eve participating in a cookery course, this course was proper good. To start with they took us to a food market to show us where to get the ingredients we needed:

Haha, no we didn’t actually need dog for the recipes we were learning but you could buy it there if you wanted.

After the market we went to the cookery school kitchen where we were given a massive knife each :

We learnt how to cook the following recipes;

Aubergine with chilli paste

Chicken with cashew nuts

Beer fish

Stuffed vegetables

Garlic cabbage

Here’s Debbie with her finished dishes:

Which out of the below 2 dishes looks best? Left or Right?

Yeah I agree, the left one (that was mine!). When I get chance I’ll put some of the recipes online so you can have a try yourself.

After we’d cooked all the food we got to eat it all, it took about 2 hours to cook everything and about 5 minutes to eat it all, it was delicious.

From the cookery course we went back to our hostel were there was supposed to be a Christmas Eve party. It wasn’t exactly a party but a group of people sitting around making dumplings. Don’t get me wrong it was quite fun but not exactly how we wanted to spend Christmas Eve so we scoffed a load of dumplings then snuck off into town.

Have you ever played Beer Pong? It’s a well good game, I hadn’t played it before but we went to a bar called “Monkey Jane’s” and challenged the current champions to a game which we won!! ….. They won their title back a bit later on L.

Christmas Day

Not so much to say about Christmas day, what do you do on Christmas? Eat, drink be merry…. we also played table football!

Merry Christmas everyone!

We’d gotten up and left Lijiang quite early so even after a 2 hour mini bus ride we still managed to start our trek through the gorge by about 11am. After a few hours of walking we reached the top of the appropriately named “28 Bends” which put us at 2670 meters above sea level (the highest I’ve ever walked), here’s a picture of us at that height with a rather nice mountain backdrop:

As usual I’ll make a photo album to put all the pictures we took in; the gorge was pretty amazing so these ones might actually be worth a look at.

A few hours later, after getting lost and un-lost, we arrived at the “Half Way guest house” (yes it was located at half way through the trek) where we spent the night. The room we got had an amazing view of the mountain range opposite us (but not as good as the view from the toilets!!).

I didn’t sleep too well through the night, for some reason I had a headache and was sweating all night (despite the freezing cold temperatures) so instead spent about 5 hours staring at the moonlit mountains through our window (good job we had a room with a view). I also managed to convince myself I’d caught either Denge fever or malaria (or both) but I soon forgot about it when it got to 07.30 and was time for a banana and chocolate pancake J

After breakfast we set off walking again and after a couple of hours stopped at Tina’s guest house for a cup of tea and an apple pie. On the way there we had to walk under a waterfall; here’s a picture of Debbie standing under the waterfall:

From Tina’s we walked down to the bottom of the gorge and the Tiger Leaping Stone (named after a stone from which a tiger once leaped up out of the gorge or something), all the time paying great attention to the safety regulations:

Here’s a picture of me and Debbie at the bottom of the gorge:

On the way back up the gorge we decided to take an alternative route called “The Sky Ladder”; a big ladder straight up the side of a cliff, ridiculously dangerous but great fun:

A few ladder rungs later we got back to a road and caught a mini bus back to Lijiang.

On the morning of our flight I got up and had a shower and a shave, then shaved my head and as it happens made a right toss job of it (beard trimmers aren’t the best tool for the job). I figured I’d eat breakfast and then sort out the patchy mess that was my haircut, however, during breakfast we found out that the girl that booked our flights had dropped a bollock and spelt Debbie’s surname wrong so we had to high tail it to the airport to sort it out, dodgy haircut and all.

In Lijiang we stayed in a place called “Old Town” which true to its name, was an old town. It was really nice, a bit touristy but good fun.

Wuchang

In Wuchang we booked a cruise on the Yangtze river and a tour of the three gorges dam project thing. The cruise was from Yichang to Chonqing so after a night in Wuchang (and some really nice noodles) we got a bus to Yichang.

Yichang

The journey to Yichang took about 5hrs and when we arrived someone met us off the bus and took us to a cheap, but pretty nice, hotel, it was really nice to have everything sorted out for us! We ate a massive pot full of very spicy prawns and chillies, had a few beers, then went to bed. The next morning we went to the three gorges dam.

Here’s a picture of the three gorges dam:

I reckon that the story behind the dam project such as the making of, and the environmental impact it had after flooding the gorge would have been absolutely fascinating, however, we didn’t find out that information (at least not in a language we could understand) so it was a bit boring. After the dam we visited a pre-dam Yangtze river three gorges memorial park, it was an absolute bag of shit. Seriously, some of the tourist attractions in China are absolute jokes and this was one of the worst I’ve seen. I think the highlight of today’s excursion was the branch of oranges I bought for 10p; check it out:

Cruise

Later on we got a coach to the harbour where our home for the next few days was docked and waiting for us, we boarded and went to our cabin. This is our ship:

 Our cabin was in first class but there wasn’t any ‘class’ about it, it was a scrotty, hairy, little cabin with an ensuite toilet/shower room where flushing the toilet gave you more of a shower than the actual shower did. On the plus side, our room did have a massive window in it so we could enjoy the outside scenery:

Three Lesser Gorges

We got up ridiculously early on our first morning on the ship and boarded a medium sized boat which took us on a tour of the three lesser gorges; these were quite impressive, I took a few pictures, here’s one of them:

After a while of cruising around we got off of our medium sized boat and got on to a small boat which would take us around the narrower parts of the gorge. Here’s a picture of the small boat:

As we were sailing along the crew sang us a song and a guy in a little hut high up on a cliff played his flute for us as we passed. They were all really good!

After swapping back from the small boat to the medium boat and from the medium boat to the large boat we set sail for the second of today’s excursions:

Village where Monks make wooden combs next to temples on a hill by the river

I can’t remember the actual name of this place (maybe you guessed) and there’s not a lot to say about it that the title doesn’t already say. Upon arrival, however, someone did try and sell me a comb before realising I had no hair, which made me laugh.

Back at the boat we had a meal in the restaurant, a nice bottle of red wine and then headed off to bed as we have to get up at 06.00 again tomorrow for a trip to Fengdu.

Fengdu

I woke up about 00.30 with a really bad stomach pain and then proceeded to throw my guts up for the next 4 hours. I must have eaten something that my body really didn’t want inside me and it was pretty insistent on getting it out so by 06.00, time to go on our trip to Fengdu, I was an absolute wreck.

Fengdu is a ghost town filled with spooky tourist attractions. Apparently, Chinese people used to believe that it was Hell, maybe some of them still do, I don’t know, all I do know is that I must have looked like one of the tourist attractions – a sweaty zombie like figure staggering around trying not to throw up on things.

As I was in such a frail state I couldn’t handle taking photographs so I left Debbie in charge of that and when I got my camera back it was full of homoerotic images and pictures of bestiality:

Back on the boat I slept (and whimpered) a lot and eventually we arrived in Chonqing where our cruise ended.

Here’s a picture of our tent:

The Lantau trail is a 70km trail which follows the mountain tops through the middle of the island to start with and then doubles back and follows the coast all the way back to the start.

We arrived on the island late afternoon on Tuesday 2^nd December, had a curry and a beer at the Bombay cafe then walked to a nearby camp site to get an early night ready for a long day tomorrow. The campsites on the island are all free and have pretty good facilities including fire pits and since there were lots of weird, eerie, snake noises it was a good job too. We lit a fire and that kept them all away (we’d have definitely/probably been eaten by snakes otherwise).

3^rd December

An early start today and we walked up (and down) the 2^nd highest (Sunset Peak) and highest (Lantau Peak) peaks on Lantau island (3^rd and 2^nd highest in Hong Kong). Here’s a picture of me next to the second highest peak whilst standing on the highest peak:

It doesn’t look so impressive from this angle. How about this:

Looks much higher now J

At 869m and 934m they weren’t particularly difficult but it was hard work carrying most of our worldly possessions up them both. The scenery, however, was amazing and totally worth the effort. I’ll make a new photo album called Lantau Island for all the photos.

We eventually made it to Ngong Ping where there is a massive statue of Buddha on top of a hill. It’s the Tian Tan Buddha and is apparently the largest outdoor bronze Buddha statue in the world at just under 34m high (including its podium) and weighing 202 tonnes. Here’s a picture of us with the big fella:

4^th December

Due to landslides some of the paths were closed including one which we were planning on walking along so we had to modify our route which cut about 10km off of today’s walking (how unfortunate :p). As a result we arrived at our campsite in daylight for a change and this campsite was totally immense. We were basically camping on the beach and we had the whole place to ourselves. Here’s a picture of the beach, taken a few metres from our tent:

The only downside to this campsite was, since it was so remote, there were no shops or restaurants nearby so for tea we had a tin of beans and then, using the bean tin as a saucepan, we cooked some noodles, mixed them in with some sardines and ate them out of plastic bags :s.

5^th December

Last night was ridiculously windy but somehow our crappy little tent survived. Today’s walking was quite easy and most of the day was spent searching for a decent meal. We walked passed two prisons and took a detour to Shek Pik to see some 3000 year old rock carvings (they weren’t very impressive).

 6^th December

It only took a couple of hours of walking this morning and we were back at Mui Wo port and the trail was finished. We had another curry at the Bombay cafe (and a chocolate Sunday from Macdonalds) to celebrate then went back to Kowloon.

On the 29^th November  met Debbie at the airport and we spent a few days in and around Hong Kong doing sight seeing and what not. Here are a few of the things we did:

We got a ferry across Victoria harbour – I wasn’t expecting to be able to see across the harbour as I’d read that air pollution was quite bad (apparently it was impossible to see across the harbour 1 day out of 6 in 2004) but was pleasantly surprised to have perfect visibility all the time we were there.

Then we went on the Peak Tram which took us up to the Peak Tower. The tram is insane and although it is called a tram it’s basically a tram compartment that’s hauled up the side of a cliff at an angle close to 45 degrees by a massively thick cable. Here’s a picture of me and Debbie at the top of Peak Tower at night time:

I know, I look pretty demented for some reason but check out the illuminations behind us!

We also went to a big park with an aviary in it and another park which had a zoo in it! Both of which were free!!

I’ll make a new photo album called Hong Kong and put a load of photos in there.

On a whole Hong Kong is wicked but it is not a cheap place to stay so we decided to buy a tent and go to Lantau Island (Hong Kong’s largest island) where we planned on doing some walking (because walking is free), and camping in the free campsites which we’d heard about. It’s not an important detail but we bought the tent from an area in Hong Kong called Mong Kok, I’m only mentioning it because I think it it’s a funny place name.