Stuck in the mountains?

We carried on our mountain tour riding from Wuling to Li-Shan. We started off in the magical
Shei-Pa National Park with stunning red maple leaves, fantastic limestone rock and blue rivers. It
wasn’t a particularly long stretch, but the journey was beautiful, taking us through the fruit growing
epicentre of Taiwan. It was amazing to see such steep land converted into such productivity. At this
time of year it was mainly persimmons and late season apples…each fruit wrapped in a plastic bag
presumably to stop damage.
We hit the pleasant town of Li-Shan (Pear Mountain) after battling up an 18% incline. Steffen took a
photo of me pushing my bike at this stage and wisely deleted it – think red, hot and bothered.
There’s also lots of tea growing around Lishan and now is the time of harvest and curing. There are
quite a number of tea processing businesses in town and the streets have the wonderful fragrance
of freshly cured tea.
This morning we decided to finally start our journey down to the western flatlands around Taichung
City. There were many squeals of delight on the 15km downhill – we were really getting into the
rhythm of a nice long descent when we were intercepted by some official-looking folk who kindly
informed us that the road we were taking was closed to bikes and we need to ride back to Lishan. It
nearly brought tears to our eyes (well, it maybe did for Max) and we begrudgingly rode back up the
way we came ( I know which direction is more fun!). We decide to make the best of a bad situation
and call it quits for the day and use the time to do homework, rest up, drink tea and play cards.
We’re thinking that this fail might be a sign from the Gods that we should try and tackle Taroko
Gorge instead. Let’s see what tomorrow brings.