Millerine and I have only about 5 days to get in some sites after the frisbee tournament, so we left the day after to the mountain area of Alishan. We caught the train to Chiayi and found that there we were too late for the trains to Alishan and had just missed out on the buses. We went to hire a car, but from what I could understand of the contract we were not insured at all so I didn't want to risk it. At 15:30 something fairly strange happened. The streets became full of military police, the roads were shut down, and some kind of curfew came into action for about half an hour. We weren't even allowed to walk on the streets. At 16:00 an alarm went off and suddenly everything went into action again. I'm still not sure what it was for.

We managed to find a bus to the mountain town of Rueili, about half way to Alishan. The bus trip was fairly epic. It took about three hours of winding up a steep mountain road, which didn't treat my hangover all that well. The view was great until it got dark, and then you could see lights all over the mountains.

The people at our Hotel were very friendly and fed us a good simple dinner and breakfast, but the bed was rock hard and there was a lot of noise. It was on the side of the mountain and the views reminded me a bit of Podolševa in Slovenia, except with more tea, bananas and bamboo. The town is between 1000m and 1200m altitude.

In the morning the hotel guy drove us to the trailhead for the Rueili-Fenchihu historic trail. It's a 7km walk, but the first 3km is quite a steep upwards climb. It was through a shady bamboo forest and the views were great, but I was sweating a lot and a bit worried that 1.2L of water was nowhere near enough. The trail leveled off and got easier by about halfway though.

Fenchihu itself was a nice but very touristy little mountain village (all local tourists I think - we were the only white people there). For NT$100 we got a good feed of soup and some rice and vegies (served by none other than Confucious himself), then jumped on the train to go back to Chiayi. This is a tourist attraction in itself. It's a tiny little narrow guage railway that ambles down the mountain through tunnels and over bridges. The mountain views are good but we were going through a fair bit of cloud so the visibility wasn't great.

From Chiayi we are taking the High Speed Rail to Taipei where we'll stay the night.