Month October 2017
Like I mentioned in my last post, the wife and I went from Singapore to Hong Kong to meet up with my parents for a few days. We’ve both been in Hong Kong before and we’ve checked off all the standard tourist stuff like Victoria Harbour, the Star Ferry and the peak. However, my parents have been in Hong Kong a number of times before and my mom, ever the travel agent for the family, had found a number of places slightly off the beaten track for us to visit.
The Hong Kong Heritage Museum at Shatin supposedly has a … Read the rest
National holidays in Taiwan largely follow the lunar calendar, and this year the mid autumn festival fell on October 4th and the National day is on October 10th. With a weekend between the two, it means a lot of people only have to take a few days off to get a full week’s vacation. Naturally Renegade Wife and I made use of this opportunity.
My parents are going on a tour in China but will stop in Hong Kong for a few days before it starts. We wanted to see them but we couldn’t spend an entire week in Hong … Read the rest
I’m in the most amazing market I have ever seen! The entire street is full of stalls, crammed so tightly together it’s impossible to know where one ends and the next one begins. In the the middle of the stalls is a narrow passage that is so full of people, both locals and tourists, that you can hardly turn around without bumping into anyone. Nearly every vendor in the market is selling things for the upcoming Deepavali festival. There are entire walls covered in garlands of artificial flowers; there are tables laden with boxes of fireworks; and from the canvas … Read the rest
Even with the lens of my camera set to the widest setting, a photograph cannot do justice to the tree in front of me. I’ve seen big trees before, ones that are much taller than average and ones whose trunk is so thick it would take ten people, their arms wide open touching finger tip to finger tip, to reach around it, but nothing like this. This is gigantic in every way. The trunk is thick and tall with knots and bulges here and there, forming a stout base that stands halfway down a slope and extends upwards, towering above … Read the rest
A couple of weeks ago I was studying the map and found a route just outside Hsinchu that looked like it would be fun to ride on the motorbike. Renegade wife and I attempted to do it that weekend but got caught in some heavy rain and had to turn back. This weekend we decided to try again. For those interested, the rout consists of a series of small roads that connect two of the main mountain roads near Hsinchu, you can can see the map below for details.
The ride out of the city is rather boring but once … Read the rest
It’s the type of waterfall you might read about in an adventure novel or see in an Indiana Jones movie; the stream goes tumbling over the edge some twenty or thirty meters above the valley, twisting and turning in the air then hitting a large rock at the bottom, sending plumes of spray high into the air. The sound is like that of torrential rain or a faucet opened at maximum, the rush as the water falls through the air and the deep booming when it hits the bottom. The day is still yet here at the fall the rush … Read the rest