After Chinese new year it felt good to be home and relax a bit but it felt even better to be able to ride my scooter again. So, the day after me and Yini got back to Hsinchu, we got on the scooter and went out for some random ridning in the city.
We started by going back to the closed off new road described here, and exploring the area it connects to.

We made one round at the end of that road and discovered another, almost empty stretch of asphalt. On the way back from there however, I found an even better place. I turned off to the right because I saw a few concrete barriers, which lead us to a blocked off bridge. A sign informed us that the foundation of the brige had been damaged by  typhoon, so naturally I had to check it out (several hundred cars passing by each day might be bad, 70 kilos of Anders would surely not break it). The view from the bridge was mostly a dried out river bed, but about halfway across, we saw that the main flow of the river actually turned into a rather large water fall.

This deserved a closer look, so we found a way down to the river bed itself, and crossed over to the river and what we found there was fabulous. It looked like some rather dramatic rock formations in the stream but closer inspection showed that it was actually dried mud that had been shaped into rock like, layered ciffs. It is really hard to describe them, and sadly I had made the mistake of leaving the camera at home. Just think of it as some beautiful cliffs and a waterfall, only, the cliffs can be broken off like pieces of clay. I have got to go back there another day and bring a camera.

Having frolicked among the mud cliffs for a while we ventured on and by chance found a small bike path under the motorway. We followed it for a while until Yini realized we were running low on fuel, so we headed back to find a petrol station. Fuel crisis averted, I suggested we go to the stone steps in the water and the abandoned park that we discovered two years ago. You can read more about it on my old, long dead blog.

The place looked much the same as that time, but continuing along a dirt at the end of the park, we found another fresh tarmac bike path that we followed. Eventually it connected back to the one we were on earlier. Following that to the end, not having any trouble with petrol this time, it lead to the point where we entered the river bed earlier. Essentialy, there is a very long bike path going past the abandoned park, past the stone steps in the water and all the way to the mud cliff waterfall. On the way back you can go by the closed off part of Gong Dao Wu. It’s a perfect route for a bit of renegade tourism.

Back in more civilised areas, we decided to go to Zhudong for ice cream, only to find that the store was closed, so we headed back home and called it a day.