Sorry Folks, not much happened on the 12th. I doubt even relatives will bother much with this report. Relatives especially even.

We did say farewell to Hualien and, as a result, spent much of the day getting ready for the train trip, travelling on the 229klm train trip and finding our way back to the Dong Wu Hotel after the train trip.

A lovely dinner at a local 'greasy chopsticks' - pork dumplings and egg & spinach soup. We chose these items for dinner as earlier in the trip someone kindly wrote these two dishes on a piece of paper for us in Mandarin. Now, whenever we can't read a menu we just hand over the note and, hey presto, dinner!

For those still reading - and because this post is quite boring - I will tell you a quick story wherein I humiliate myself.

When we were in Taichung I had occasion to be using a public dunny for peeing purposes. Glancing around I noticed a small red lever on the wall - which I immediately operated.

It transpires this sets off a very loud, very public alarm which alerts the Authorities that someone inside said dunny was experiencing a serious emergency of some kind - presumably a quite personal kind.

'Oh dear' says I, 'There's no-one else in view to blame and simply running out the door might look incriminating so I'll just pretend nothing out of the ordinary is happening'.

A reasonable plan but not very effective- when the five (!) different staff Members rushed into the toilet there was, of course, only one person there, washing his hands.

Ciao.