Our first glimpse of the ocean near Taitung

It is winter break in Taiwan and I have 4 weeks of vacation to explore the island. We started the adventure with a train ride to Taitung on the southeastern coast. Check out the many sights we enjoyed as we drove and walked along the coast.

Platform of the Three Immortals, Taitung county

The Platform of the Three Immortals is a series of arched bridges leading to a small island. It was quite stormy the day we were visiting and the winds were whipping about strongly. It was still a beautiful sight to see.

The White Jade waterfall near Chihpen

Just a "few" stairstep up we viewed the beautiful white Jade waterfall. My niece, Julie, was visiting and is seen in the last picture. The quartet are Sophie, Linda, Karen and Brian.

Putting in the rice crop

The modern way of planting rice.

A Japanese-style building housing artists/craftsmen

This building housed aboriginal artwork/crafts of which you see one artists designing beads.

Penan Cultural Park--Taitung

This is an active archaeological dig of the Puyuma aboriginals who lived at site 5000 years ago. What you see in each picture is as follows: 1. snake warnings--fortunately, it is winter and we did not see any snakes, 2. models of ancient dwellings, 3. a shrine to a ground god, 4. the archaeological site with a ladder in one picture, 5. ceremonial stones raised by the tribe. The park was discoverd in 1980 when several thousand stone coffins were found in an an ancient graveyard.

The foods of Taitung

We had many delicious foods in Taitung and started with dumplings cooked in wooden steaming baskets. We visited Fruit Street where we saw a rainbow of colors. The pink fruit is called Dragon fruit and is a white fleshy fruit with tiny black seeds (think of a kiwi) throughout. Another wonderful fruit is the Buddha fruit which is the green, bumpy item. Wow!! It is juicy and refreshing and a specialty of the Taitung area. We were welcomed with tea at our hotel and ate at a Japanese barbeque one night. It was very similar to the Korean barbeque in Indianapolis and we consumed a lot of beef, fish, shrimp and crab meat.

Flowers of Taitung