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In holiday and adventure mood, the weekend following guanziling and the waterfall, me and Simon got up early and headed to Chiayi.  Here, we baorded a tiny train called the Alpine train, on the Alishan Forest Railway.  This railway climbs up over 2000 metres and takes about 4 hours, but the scenery is awesome - you start in a town and then watch as the palm trees change into alpine forests! And the train winds and winds around crazy steep mountains, it’s amazing how they built it.

Alishan is the last stop and where we got off.  A cultural show of dancing greeted us at the station which was nice, and then a Taiwanese person took us to their homestay.  Unfortunately we could not communicate at all, both us knowing way to little of the other person’s language, however that didnt stop us trying and we ended up talking at each other for a while - that would have been interesting to subtitle!  The town is pretty small, high up so a nice crisp air, and mountains all around.  We drank beer and watched the awesome sunset, ate hotpot and enjoyed the atmosphere and scenery.

At 4am we woke up, to be taken to the mountain to see the sunrise.  We ended up being really near where we were the weekend before for Jade.  We got offloaded at the side of the road, and given a dark glass to look through.  The sunset was nice, you could literally see the ball of sun appearing millimetre by millimetre over the mountain.  Although the lack of clouds didn’t make it very colourful, it was still nice.  On the drive home we stopped at a big tree, and also to see a group of monkeys bouncing in the trees, on the road, and eventually on the cars!

Back in Alishan we had a nap to recover, ate some brekkie then headed back down the mountain, this time in a car rather than a train, the scenery gradually changing back into tropical, and the air getting warmer and warmer.