Today we woke up in this really small town, which is actually a farming town. They have a really fancy hotel called Lakeshore, which is what the docent said where people worked. If you are young and look for work, you would go to Taipei.
First place we went to was the central coast island highway. It is a pretty sad story, essentially all these guys using explosives and handtools in 1950’s dug out holes in the mountain and made a road. It cost 225 people their lives and they were not able to keep in contact with their families for 30 years. So there is a shrine made for them a little father away, which has had to be rebuilt 2 times because of landslides.
There was also a nice river flowing through the area. Nothing too spectacular except that all of this was done with hands and explosive.
Then we went to a jade store, and because I didn’t want any salesperson following me, I just stuck as close to a pack of people as possible.
For lunch here was a Chinese meal, and they put the gluttonous rice in a bamboo shoot that you broke to pull out. I thought that a cool way to make rice.
Then I made it to the tropic of cancer marker. Hooray, I crossed from northern hemisphere to tropics.
