The Great Pacific Coast Bicycle Voyage (Highway 11, Taiwan): Day 1
This post is about the last great huzzah of this trip. To be frank, we shocked ourselves signing up for this bike ride. I didn’t even learn to properly bike until I was 20, and the vast majority of my biking was a flat 9-minute commute to campus from my South Miami bungalow. But there it was, in Taiwan’s Lonely Planet: One of the top 15 things recommended by the book was to bike the Scenic East Coast of Taiwan, down Highway 11, from the town of Hualien to the one other major town on the coast: Taitung.
The trip involved biking 112 miles (or roughly 180km) south, along the coastal road that snaked in between the vast Pacific Ocean and the sky-high mountains encompassing Taiwan’s interior. Thankfully, for most of the trip, it was relatively flat (lots of slightly rolling hills), but that was not the case our first day.
Preparations
We had two major things we needed to take care of before the trip: securing bikes and arranging transport for our bags. Thankfully, both went without a hitch. Taiwan’s train system has a beautiful system where they will transport your bags from station to station (and keep in mind Taiwan has an awesome national rail system), and hold the bags for several days, for an incredibly cheap price. We headed to Hualien train station to drop off our bags, and it turned out to be TWD$90 (About $3). Perfect.
Our next stop was Giant Bicycles, a Taiwanese brand that is also the largest manufacturer of bicycles in the world. Their shop was a block from the train station. We showed up, saw if they had a few bikes, and the man was quiet direct with his “no” response. Not unfriendly, and we were the ones who were winging the trip. Though he was nice enough to direct us to another shop renting bikes for the same trip. The other shop was a bit strange. It was a hybrid pet shop (including everything from tarantulas to various fishes) and bike rental shop. Not much English was spoken, but we were able to get our point across: 4 days rental, with a drop off in Taitung. The bikes were high-quality road bikes, and included storage on either side of the back and front wheels, which was much appreciated. They even had a device that would tell us how fast we were going and how many km we had biked that day. We got set up by about 12 noon, and off we went.
Day 1 — Off we go!
With our bikes, without our bags, and with one change of clothes, we were off! We didn’t have a set destination in mind, but we had a goal of 1/4 of the kilometers of our journey, which pegged us at 45km. Keep in mind, neither of us had been on a bicycle in quite some time, though we were in decent shape. It was about 12 noon, temperature sunny and around 80, and a long road ahead of us. We spent some time making out of Hualien, and slowly the city developments slowed down to a dusty road with few cars and several suburban commercial buildings. We finally make it onto highway 11 proper, and its the only road (the next north-south road, highway 9, is separated by a large mountain range, and streets connecting the two are quite sparse).
Of course, we got distracted immediately. We saw a streetwear/fairgrounds/complex thing that had cool architecture and even a shipping container painted in the brand Supreme. They also had a Starbucks made out of other stacked and criss-crossing shipping containers, so about 8km in, we decided that it would be a good resting point for lunch.
In hindsight — it was probably good we stopped. There wasn’t even a convenience store for upwards of half the trip. We soon take a turn to cross the mountain range between the coast and the rest of Taiwan (thankfully not too uphill), and soaked in the sun rays, ebbing roads, and crashing waves of the Pacific.
Nothing much to report on (except the egregious amount of tunnels we went through), until about 30 km in. So, the road started to go uphill. I powered through, though Lena decided to start walking the bike up fairly early on. But then the road *kept* going uphill. I started walking my bike. We walked maybe 3 km, and the sun was starting to set. And the road just kept going up and up the mountain range. We did not sign up for this!*
*We actually did, in fact, sign up for this.
We were pooped, and getting a bit discouraged. Thankfully (and for basically the whole road) there were wide bike lanes, and traffic was sparse to nonexistent. And then, as the sun was stopping from gracing us with its rays of daylight, the road stopped going uphill. It flattened for just a few short meters, and then went downhill.
And as darkness fell, it went downhill, downhill, downhill. We weaved through the jungled mountains on our left and our right, the pitch blackness of the Pacific just out of sight. We went 20km/h, 30 km/h, 40 km/h down and down. It was bliss. Adrenaline pumping bliss. We had long stopped pedaling, gracing around the weaves and turns of our guardian Highway 11, leaning left and right into the meandering road. We stopped briefly at an overlook, soaking up some of the sparse building lights dotting the coast as we looked south, before taking off once more.
We finally made it to the bottom of the mountain, either 5 minutes or 1 hour after we left the top of the mountain (I’m not sure to this day), and we found ourselves a hotel. I scrounged around for the concierge, who informed us that they were full for the night. They talked for a bit, and took us next door, to a family’s home. It turns out they were a B&B, and were willing to put us up for the night. They welcomed us with drinks and warmth while they made our room up, and they the most wonderful amenities I could ever ask for: 5 cats. I was in heaven! At one point, they had even taken our room over, 2 under the bed, one on the couch, and 1 on top of the closet drawers, all informants scouring the room (and us!). It soon became apparent that the cats were not allowed in the room (which made so much sense as to why they had to be in the room), and the husband starts shooing the cats away, one by one. With one cat left in the room, he leans in, yanks the cat out, and that was that.
Or so we thought.
About a minute later, out peers from behind the couch the last cat, puppy-eyed and deathly curious, as if to say “is he gone? Is it safe to come out?”. Lena and I burst out laughing, looking at him like he was an illegal stowaway on his way to a better life. Sadly, we had to shoo that cat away as well, and go to bed.
In the morning, there was an entire family eating breakfast. Not the family that had put us up, but another Taiwanese cohort. Strange, unexplained, but the husband and wife that owned the B&B still made us a lovely breakfast, and wished us farewell onto our second (and thankfully less mountainous) day on our great Pacific bike trip.
