Tainan was our next stop and we didn't arrive until 2am. Fortunately for us Ryan's friend was up to hitting up the local bar. It's interesting to see how traveling can lead to such amazing coincidental meetings. Our friends in Tainan met in Spain and have been together ever since (more than 2 years ago). Thomas lived in Georgia where his parents are currently residing and his girlfriend Barbie is currently working on her masters. Barbie is from Argentina but her parents currently live in Brazil. Both speak spanish fluently so the dynamics are really interesting as far as how they can communicate especially since they live in Taiwan.
The bar we hit up was ful of englis speaking foreigners. The bartender ws from Portland and had no shirt on with x-shaped scoth tape covering both his nipples. After about an hour the locals drew a six pack on him with a sharpie. Let's just say it was an interesting crowd with people from all over. We ended up going to another bar at around 645AM after the sun came up. This bar had more locals in it and the party was dying ddown for the day. We finally decided to call it a day and head back to Thomas's house at around 730ish.
The apartment Thomas and Barbie live in is surrounded by tight alleys giving it a nice narrow feel.
We started the next day renting scooters to head out of town into the mountains. Riding a scooter in Tainan was pretty intimidating. The population of Tainan is about 1.9 million so it's decent in size for trffic and congestion. It took us about 30 minutes to actually get out of the city and it was a bit of a riot. Dodging loads of other scooters and cars in another country makes for an interesting commute.
On the way to the mountain there was muc to see but we started our day off late since we went to sleep at close to 8am. An interesting sculpture of a person riding wooly mammoths and the biggest Tibetan temple in Taiwan.
Housed inside the temple is supposed to be one of the biggest tibetan buddhist statues in the world.
After the temple we ran into some more little shrines and temples. The best part of the trip was when we finally hit he Mei Ling Scenic trail and proceeded to go up in elevation. The road narrowed and the fauna became a bit more exotic. Te views were quite amazing.
The view was beautiful and numbing but the ride back was totally not...it started raining and the sun was down by that time. We were about the only scooters on the road and the rain stuck to te fabric of our clothes. I could go on about the potential hazards of our drive back but I won't. We made it back in one piece and heade straigt to the market.
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