The Sydney Morning Herald from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia • Page 213

6t Travel THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 1997 Forgotten jeel of the From Travel 1 he morning sun had iust shoul dered its way over the mountain ridges and was filling the valley Orient I If a4 It snakes along the gorge wall, darting in and out of numerous tunnels, emerging beneath dripping overhangs, and is so narrow in places that if two buses come face to face, one must retreat before the traffic flow can resume. Indeed, there were times during our trip into the gorge when I believed we would never make it. The trip is just 19 kilometres, but it took well over an hour. The problem was that we were travelling on the last day of the school holidays and the road -never designed for bumper-to-bumper traffic was a chaos of tourist buses and trucks and private cars and motor scooters. At one point, a double-decker bus appeared to be in danger ot becoming stuck in a low tunnel, emerged (backwards) only after a symphony of arm-waving, shouting and horn-blowing.

By then, the traffic jam had extended several kilometres down the gorge. Yet you can forgive such irritations. The natural surroundings have the power to transport you from the confines of your vehicle. Simply sitting and taking in the view is pleasure enough and it is possible, with a little effort, to ignore the belching exhausts and the roaring motors of the tour buses that have, essentially, saved the place from quarrying. Besides, you can get out and walk.

Alongside the road at many places are little paths, some with their own tunnels through the hillsides. From these pathways you can peer down to the tumbling waters of the Liwu River, which is carving relentlessly still deeper into the gorge, its waters creamy with the limestone from which the marble is formed. At one perfectly magical spot, swallows have built thousands ot nests into the cliffs. During the day. the little birds fill the air, skimming and darting, feeding on airborne insects.

Their song echoes are magnified, and the place is known simply as Swallow Grotto. At another magical place, a waterfall spills over a shrine to the 453 people who died building the Further along, a tributary joins the main river. The Laohsi stream tumbles from high hills, and where it joins the Liwu. everything changes. The sparkling white marble further down the canyon becomes deep green and black, and the Taiwanese have marked the spot with a pagoda on either side of the road the Orchid and the Merciful Mother.

The latter is named for the mother of modern Taiwan's founder, Chiang Kai-shek. It is a sort of sacred place, but young Taiwanese do not treat it with quiet reverence. Instead, while I was there a whole gang on zippy motor scooters drew up. spilling young men and women who ran in a giggling cavalcade to Tony Wright and Herald photographer Kiel Stevens travelled to Taiwan courtesy oj Mandarin Airlines and were guests of tin Taiwan Tourism Authority. Bubbly time a young girl playing in a Taiwan park.

Right: the waterfall and shrine at the Taroko National Park. with gold when we crossed the suspension bridge over the river. Above, a pagoda took the first of the sun's rays, its shining structure fairly bursting from the jungle foliage all round. Beyond, hundreds of exhausting steps led us to a hilltop temple. Buddhist monks armed with little straw brooms swept the gravel yard.

Incense wafted and mingled with subtle cooking aromas emanating from open braziers. It would have been perfect had there not been loudspeakers mounted all around, blasting a particularly discordant noise into the breaking day. The taped voice, in Mandarin, yammered on and on. and was still yammering as we finally fled back over the suspension bridge, swaying high above the river, back to the giant asphalt car park outside the brand-new hotel. Taiwan can be like that.

Beautiful one minute, bizarre the next. It can happen in a restaurant. There you are, happily exploring the astounding flavours of local seafood, when suddenly you are confronted with a plate of live shellfish writhing in agony in a sea of boiling oil, as happened to us in a seaside village on the island's east coast. When the poor creatures finally expired I'm quite sure they were delicious my appetite had taken flight, just as it did when a plate of something described. as sliced pigs' testicles arrived on the table at a restaurant in the west coast city of Taichung.

It can occur during a walk by the seaside. About to take a stroll to a viewing platform over a strange rock formation known as the Cat's Nose, jutting into the ocean in the Kenting National Park on the southern tip of the island, the day took a brief turn for the worse when I was confronted with a big rusting sign. In tortured language, it gave instructions on hat to do if there was an accident at the nuclear reactor crouching behind the dunes in the distance. The idea, it seemed, was to find a policeman who would direct you to the nearest nuclear shelter, where you should wait until sirens sounded to give the all-clear. On the outskirts of the southwest city of Kaohsiung is the stunning Lotus Lake, which in the morning sun appears as a dream: a pier thrusts out to a tra- i ditional pavilion, mirrored on the perfectly still lake.

On one side of the lake are the graceful autumn and spring pavilions on the other, as a part of a Confucian temple, are the huge Dragon and Tiger pagodas. It could be a place for deep contemplation unless, of course, you happen to peer into the waters of the lake to discover dead fish floating belly-up, perhaps poisoned by the monstrous amount of garbage floating just below the scum. Of course, one can be too precious about these sort of things. That yammering voice at the hilltop temple may have been imparting fascinating historical and cultural information and sliced pigs' testicles may well be a delicacy to the gourmets of Taichung. That nuclear power plant in the national park provides the sort of energy required to run a million factories that have lifted much of Taiwan's population from poverty to the middle class.

And who are we, from a vast, underpopulated country, to wrinkle our noses at the discovery that one of only three lakes in a city of perhaps 2 million people is polluted? What can be said with utter certainty is that Taiwan is constantly startling. Few Australians visit the island as tourists most fly in for busi ness. The result is a widely held view among Australians that Taiwan is an island of overpopu-lated, dreadfully polluted industrial cities. Indeed, you would imagine that a place that manages to cram more than 21 million people into an area less than half the size of Victoria could be nothing more than an aesthetic disaster. You would, however, be wrong.

There are huge industrial cities cloaked in a choking haze of smog, but even here can be found the heartbeat of ancient cultures in the splendid night markets, the astonishingly elaborate festivals, the fabulous "range of eating establishments (from tiny holes-in-the-wall to vast restaurants) and often, the surprising discovery of a teahouse, a gentle oasis in a desert of commerce. And in the midst of vast suburbs of smoke-belching factories sprawl rice paddies, where barefooted farmers wade through the mud. But it is beyond the big cities that you will find the most startling realities about Taiwan. This is an island on the Tropic of Cancer where snow cloaks the highest mountain tops, many of which soar beyond 3,000 metres, and the highest of which is a breath below 4,000 metres. Black bears still stalk undisturbed through conifer forests on the mountain slopes, and deer, wild boar and monkeys the Formosan macaque can be found in the seemingly endless tracts of uninhabited bush that spills either side of the mountain spine that runs almost the length of the island.

Although the most popular temples and best-known beauty spots in the inhabited edges tend to be literally crawling with visitors, it is possible to find great stretches of beach particularly on the east coast where you can walk quite alone. Nowhere is the comparison between the cities and the countryside as stark as in the Taroko Gorge, the jewel in a national park that extends from the Pacific Ocean on the north-east of the island, inland through Taiwan's most spectacular mountain country. Think of a Chinese painting, one of those works in water-colour that sweep you into an ethereal world of impressionistic patterns which, of course, could never exist in nature. Now take a trip along the Taroko Gorge. You will enter just such a painting.

The gorge is surely one of the world's great natural wonders. Its walls, carved by the waters of a mountain river, are of pure marble. They rear up to 1,000 metres above the Liwu River, rippled by those rushing waters a thousand centuries ago into the most astonishing patterns. The effect is accentuated by shadows cast by the filtered light that spills from the sliver of sky far above. These cliffs are a wonder not simply because they are so overwhelmingly beautiful but because they remain untouched.

The Taiwanese are enthusiastic consumers of marble. They build luxury hotels from it and not far from Taroko Gorge Artisans work in marble factories, polishing the rock and carving it into sion by the Government to lock out the marble quarriers and to preserve the place as a national treasure. Still, in such a densely populated country, dedicated to capitalism, no government would lock up a piece of land as pure wilderness. It must have a purpose, and that purpose has turned out to be tourism. A road has been carved into the cliffs.

The Taiwanese call it one of the great engineering feats of the century and perhaps it is. Environmentalist purists may call it a travesty. Whatever one's view of the road, it is the only way you can travel into Taroko Gorge. intricate patterns from jewellery right up to giant statues. Indeed, if you are a tourist heading to Taroko from the nearest city, Hualien, your driver will almost certainly take you to one of these factories for a The factory tour will take a desultory minute or two and you will then be ushered into the showroom where skilled salespeople will try to persuade you (and if all else fails, to shame you) into sinking half your life savings into a marble table setting or similar.

Taroko Gorge happens to have more marble cliffs than just about any other place in Taiwan, so it was a brave and far-sighted deci- with Michael Gebicki File EK View Go Favorite Help 65 ft Back Foiwoid Slop Refresh Home Search Favorite? Piint Font Mail jj Address com Links GEO XTZN iV ft A I AS MC I Eft A useful 2 Web sites dealing with culture and travel in Taiwan are few and far between, yet some of the photographs of the country hint at a landscape of leaping mountains and stylised trees that might have sprung from a Chinese painting. Travel as pleasure, it seems, is a foreign commodity, and it's business rather than pleasure that occupies Taiwan on the Net. FANCY THAT: From Rigby, the Australian publishing house, comes an encyclopedic treatment of Taiwan with a social, political, historic and economic profile that yields a few surprises, such as the astonishing size of the Taiwanese army 370,000 active members, with reserves of 1,657,000 out of a total population just slightly larger than our own. But then again, we don't have China 200 kilometres from our coastline. Unemployment is rated at 1 per cent.

http:www.reedbooks.com.au heinemannhottaiwan.html GASTRONOMIC: Travel in Taiwan is a monthly magazine put out by the country's official Tourism Bureau. The usual suspects arts, culture, dining, festivals, museums, sports and shopping are canvassed in a colourful and concise format which offers some imaginative suggestions for travellers. The section on Taiwanese food is particularly illuminating, and illustrated with scrumptious photos. http:www.sinica.edu.twtitindex.html ART TO GO: Taipei's National Palace Museum houses a collection of Chinese art and artefacts, dating back more than 7,000 years the most important single assembly of Chinese art. Its importance is enhanced in the aftermath of the China's Cultural Revolution, when China lost many of its "bourgeois" treasures.

The museum which now has almost 700,000 items -includes calligraphy, books and documents, bronzes, porcelains, jades, lacquer ware and carvings. From the opening page, you can do a virtual "walk through" of the museum. There's also a Comparison of World Cultures exhibit, which is intended to substantiate Chinese claims to be the tai-pans of world culture. http:203.70.190.21indexe.htm IN THE KNOW: Of all the online travel guides, only Microsoft's Expedia covers Taiwan. As well as the usual brief but informative survey of geography, history, arts, culture and the basic essentials for the traveller, it offers an exhilarating coverage of such natural wonders as Sun Moon Lake and Orchid Island.

There's also a phrase book for those out-of-the-way places. http:expedia.msn.comwgplaces TaiwanHSFS.htm MYTHOLOGISE: When Kuomintang forces took control of Taiwan in 1949, the indigenous culture was swamped by the new arrivals. Since then, mainland Chinese culture has held the upper hand, but Folk Stories of Taiwan shows that Taiwanese popular culture is alive. This site explores some Taiwanese folk tales and myths, and introduces some of the country's geographic landmarks and historical heroes. http:www.tatwandc.orgfolk.htm FRAMED: Evidence of Taiwan's scenic beauty comes from Timothy Radonich's Photo Gallery.

These are postcard views multi-tiered temples in misty mountains, dragons scowling from the rooftops, cobbled lanes and golden Buddhas but convincing nonetheless. http:www.whatrain.comtimmy taiwan.htm STRUNG OUT: Traditional Chinese puppetry took root in Taiwan in the 19th century and evolved its forms using marionettes, glove and shadow puppets. Many stories from Chinese puppet masters lost in China survive in largely original form in Taiwan. This site gives an overview of the art seen usually on such festive occasions as the birthday of the Jade Emperor and that of the Three Great Emperors. http:www.houstoncul.orgculdir pupppupp.htm If you've come across anything wonderful or weird in the world of virtual travel, please share the knowledge: e-mail tomikegbone.net.au You can access all these sites through the Herald's Web site: http:www.smh.com.audaily Jt Taiwan TMPEI Northwest (including Taipei) Opening picture; at liavetcjibeitaiwan.com china Affordable exciting travel ideas A new range of creative journeys for the independent and small group traveller.

New brochure Out Now! 8 days Beijing, Xian Shanghai only $1395 11 days Beijing, Xian Guilin, Shanghai onnly $1995 17 days Beijing, Xian Yunnan, Guilin Shanghai only $2780 19 days Beijing to Hanoi Overland only $2450 Call your travel agenf or Africa CP a Egypt Tasmania's Holiday Specialists Gorillas Lakes Plains Felucca Journey 14 days from $3395 15 days for $775 iravel Indochina on ytj'J.) 3Z1 9133. aOo von aoa too too aoo ap Cruise the Nile, snorkel in the Red Sea and explore some of the world's most spectacular I I historical sites. Casino Escapade "FREE SLIDE EVENINGS" RETURN S.AmericaP, 1 ft ft 678 Visit the best of Kenya's wildlife reserves, in addition to visiting the magnificent Mountain Gorillas. Nepal Everest Base Camp 18 days for $1990 View Mount Everest on this classic lode based trek, or choose from our range of treks throughout the Himalaya. ABOVE FARES IF BOOKED BY 30 lnc a Empire 15 days for $1435 Offer limited to special flights on Britannia and Airtours from Sydney to the UK on these dates.

To London: Nov 6, 12, 13, 18, 19. To Manchester Nov 20 Discover the wonders of Peru and Bolivia as you walk in the fixrtsteps of the Incas and haggle in wonderful markets. INTREPID: Small group adventure tours VIETNAM, LAOS and CHINA. Slide evenings Tuesday, September 23, 6pm Thursday, October 2, 6pm THAILAND, MALAYSIA, BORNEO, INDONESIA. Slide evening: Wednesday, September 24, 6pm ENCOUNTER: AFRICA, ASIA and SOUTH AMERICA.

Adventures, safaris overland journeys. Slide evening: Wednesday, October 1 6pm TRANS SIBERIAN and MONGOLIAN RAILWAYS, SILK ROUTE BY RAIL: Group and I I Includes airfares from Sydney to Launceston and Hobart to Sydney, 3 days economy manual car hire, 1 night at Country Club Casino, Launceston, 2 nights at Wrest Point Hotel Casino, Hobart (or vice versa), continental buffet breakfast daily and a Casino Fun Pack per booking. Extra nights $117. For bookings contact your local travel agent or Tasmanian Travel Centre. For further information call 1800 641 917.

Per person, twin share. Excluding airport tax. alia' 6 October-19 December 1997. Conditions apply. Subject to availability.

For brochures, competitive airfares and bookings, call the Peregrine Travel Centre, or your agent. Level 5, 38 York Street, Sydney 2000. independent travel. Slide evening: Tuesday, September 30, 6pm II 1 lr 9290 2770 i 'I FLIGHT 71 I i SHOP To reserve a slide evening seat, please contact: mine The Adventure Specialists: Lb Lie. 31009 CO 2) 9261 2927 Tasmania's Holidays Tasmania Discover your natural state 1st Fir, 69 Liverpool St, SYDNEY 2000 Lie 2TA 004070 I von Or Qn aO Oi Gn Cn Kt aO.