It is not a good idea to delay the booking of your train journeys in Taiwan, especially when your plans include travelling on a holiday long weekend. Not realising this, we booked our tickets from Taipei to Hualien a little late, and ended up with a standing only ticket. As long as it gets you from point A to point B, right? It is also not a good idea to sit on the platform intently looking at your phones at the best things to do in Hualien in such a manner that it makes you miss the train which happened to stop out of your sightline down the tracks due to a "short platform". (Where is the posh British voice from National Rail who warns you that this is going to happen?) Luckily, the Taiwanese rail staff were very understanding about our ineptness and modified our ticket without a fee for the next train, which amazingly, happened to get us into Hualien even earlier than our purchased ticket!

Hualien is a couple of hours down the east coast from Taipei, and this side of the country is known for being undeveloped, peaceful, and scenic. It is a popular journey for cyclists, and with time, and improved cycling skills looks like an adventure we would love to undertake, but that will have to be another time. The sole purpose of travelling to Hualien was to visit the Taroko Gorge - one of the most famous natural sights in Taiwan. Similar to Japan, Taiwan is really good about offering shuttle buses aimed at tourists, coupled with the appropriate passes that take care of your visits. We bought a two day bus pass that gave us unlimited travel between Hualien station and various stops in the National Park, as well as a stop at Qixingtan Beach where we got to tip our toes in this very clear part of the Pacific Ocean! The National Park is quite large and with the scheduling of the bus, we had to carefully plan where and when we would get off so we wouldn't be stranded facing an expensive taxi journey back, but we feel like given our short time, we got a good overview. We walked several trails along the gorge and wished that we had brought along our new filtered water bottles to try a taste of the refreshing looking water. A bit rainy and cloudy over on this side of the island, but for the start of the rainy season, we would say that we got off lucky!

Now filed under the "Delightful" category was the realisation that a fun, 1980s-ish Nintendo-like tune that we kept hearing in the streets belongs to the garbage trucks as they make their way along their routes (Troy described it as a player moving confidently through the game on his way to save the Queen.) What a lovely, cheerful way to receive your pick-up service. And filed under the "Why-haven't-we-used-this-before" category is the discovery of Google translate, and just how incredibly useful it is to be able to translate in restaurants from English to Mandarin, "No mushrooms, please". (Or you can just show servers your saved photo of mushrooms on your phone, followed by a frown, and the imitation of marking an "x" through this horrible photo.)