Alishan Tea

Tea also grows nearby, though apparently not on Alishan, where the elevation is a bit too high for it, if I remember correctly. Or maybe tea is only grown on the lower elevations of mountains.

A photograph that I took from a moving bus in the rain on the way back to Chaiyi. I think that’s tea.

This is certainly tea– it’s supposed to be that golden color. Alishan’s tea is a fine oolong. However, I have to say, it was generally rather bitter for my taste. It’s a good gift-ish sort of souvenir though.

The lovely lady who served our taste of tea turned out the first brew because it was more polite.

Generally the tea ceremony involves the boiling water swished around the teapot and then poured out after warming the vessel. Then the tea leaves are tossed in, and the hot water steeps them for just a quick second or so. Then she tossed out the first bunch of tea into the hole-y tray and took off the cover to whisk the newly unfurled fresh leaves to steam under our noses and release their scent into our faces. She then steeped the leaves again and poured the tea in tiny cups.

We sipped too much tea for around nine or ten o’clock at night for people who were waking up at four to see the sunrise. The tea left an odd sensation in my mouth like a night that is too early old.

I want to go tea picking again. And I want to go to Maokong again too… I really love the jasmine tea I picked up from there.

Can cause tears and decongestion

WordPress decided that my original post was tasty for some odd reason and swallowed it up.

Grr.

Anyway, I came upon these roots:

And wondered why someone would put up a statue of one (Well, “statue” is a bit of a loosely used term here. It does seem to be more of an amusement park decoration…)

We stopped in at one of the stands and she peeled the root, and then rubbed it vigorously against a little bumpy grater, deftly scraping some of the paste off and onto moichi (little generally sweet sticky rice cakes dusted with flour which seem to be special to every tourist destination). After popping it into my mouth, the vigorous crisp taste surged through my throat and up my nose to drag tears from my popping eyes. After a determined swallow, I let my jaw drop so I could take a deep breath of soothing cool misty air.

The combination of moichi with this was rather odd.

I took a set of flavored peanuts back to Taipei to treat my colleagues and dare my students with. There is photographic representation of my sixth grade class breathing through their noses wide-awake, but I’m afraid of their just retribution were I to post it here….

And though it does have rather painfully decongestive properties, it wasn’t able to quite battle the nasty cold I brought back with me from Alishan.

Any guesses as to what this is?

ETA: Yup Herbert and Z, it’s wasabi– though there is a Chinese name for it that I don’t remember…

Cherry Blossoms, Ing hwa

I have fond memories of the weeping cherry tree in our front yard transforming from deep pink buds to pale white petals raining down into the fresh shoots of spring grass. Last spring in Taipei was my first remembered spring without cherry blossoms.  I’d originally intended to visit Kyoto this weekend for the Cherry Blossom Festival where people picnic under the cherry trees.  Cherry blossoms are special in Japan because they embody the transience of mono no aware– a delight that holds a note of sorrow, because we know that it will pass all too quickly.

Visiting cherry blossoms in the misty mountains of Alishan was the chance to see their blush delicately intermingled with the forest of trees around them.

The deep pink of this particular kind of cherry tree I’d never seen before.

The kind that I’m more accustomed to is paler– and most of those were still in bud, though a few managed to bloom.

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Though it was still early in the season, some cherry blossoms and petals managed to slip down and nestle in the grass.

Happy Spring!

“Rosy-fingered dawn” or “The Sun Whose Rays Are All Ablaze” over Alishan

So the big crowd-pleaser at Alishan is the sunrise. We all crashed in this hostel where there were three double-bed bunkbeds crammed in a room with two bathrooms. It was perfectly pleasant and reminded me of my backpacking month in France. My little cell phone alarm woke us up at 4 AM and we headed up for the ridiculously long line to take the mountain train up to see the sunset. The mountain train was very narrow with benches on either side and room for about two people in the aisle clinging to the hand grips for dear life as the train swayed back and forth chugging upwards. The Taiwanese capacity for crowding was as usual rather impressive (though I’ve been in worse). I think the crazily crammed train might have accounted for the odd sensation of a grain of sand lodged in my throat that became a full-on bout of thready voice/sore throat and a cold for the week and a half afterwards. (My last experience with a crazy-crammed train was coming back to Tainan from Hualien, and that one resulted in half the party getting a vile tummy-thrasher for the new year.)

This is the station after most of the passengers had poured out and up the stairs to the viewing platform where there were breakfast shops and at least one guide with an obnoxious bull-horn…

The zoomed shot past all the people…

We didn’t stay here. Instead we followed this path up…

To a mostly abandoned higher platform that afforded views of the mountains all around us.

The sea of clouds completely obscured the valley, and the mountains were only shadows that echoed the clouds. Sometimes I wasn’t quite sure whether the shadow I was looking at was a mountain ridge or a cloud bank.

Sunrise is different from sunsets of my experience (Being a mao toe ing–owl, or yeh mao tze–cat, or any other beings with nocturnal tendencies, I so rarely see the sun, and morning light tends to be outside my span of wakefulness…) The horizon does have that orange glow before the sun rises, but the sun rises brightly, blindingly instead of that slow, easy-on-the eyes large orange ball of a sunset. If I could just get cool sunglasses that I wouldn’t forget in my bag where they get scratched up by my keys…. I just fiddled with the ISO in my camera and looked through the viewfinder to take a break from the sun, but here were the other methods to see the sun.

The other sunrise photographs are here.

Oh, and excuse my nerdiness for quoting Homer’s Odyssey and Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado in the subject line…

Temple on Alishan

  

People come to this temple at a particular time because it is a stopping place for this particular kind of moth.  (This is a photo of a poster in the temple showing off how the moths hang out here for fun.)

Light in the forest

This was after the sunrise we woke up for at 4 AM. Taking photographs in a forest is difficult because the light is generally limited, splotchy, etc. But by the time I was out of memory on my 1 GB card, naturally the light was lovely. (One unpleasant side-effect of shutterbug is that I keep on reaching for my camera to try to catch things, and if I can’t, the beauty of what I’m looking at is slightly clouded over by shutterbug frustration. Is there Shutterbugs Anonymous? I think I may need help.)

Alishan Tree Textures

The stumps and the shapes of the trees here remind me of driftwood at times without the wearing smoothness of the sea.

The sheer variety of mosses and things growing on the trees amazed me.

This tree was probably recently unwrapped from its protective sleeve, considering the horizontal striations–

which many of the trees have to protect them from zealous tourists taking bark shreds for souvenirs I think…

Otherwise they’d look more like this:

With vines…

Or this… The little spidery plants growing in the bark look like those aero plants that were a fad back in the US– people were supposed to put them in a glass bowl and leave them in the bathroom I believe.

More feathery moss!

Alishan

To get to Alishan, we took the high speed rail and then transferred to the mountain train from Chiayi train station. The mountain trains are small and curve around and through the mountains (the map looks something like a child gone silly with a crayon). They push through tunnels and bamboo forests up to where the forest becomes Cypress trees. The air gets cooler and cleaner filtered through all those trees.

This mountain train is coming down from the mountain into a little town that we stopped in. The trains are narrow, and switch from being pushed to being pulled up the mountain. The conductor literally hops out and pulls the switch to change the tracks as the train changes direction and circles higher.

The train station above the highest convenience store (rather appropriately–Hi-Life) in Taiwan.

But what people go to Alishan for are the trees.

There are trees that are over a thousand years old in Alishan, often with names like: “Giant Tree #3.”

Stump in the shape of a heart.

There are a lot of stumps in different shapes– my photography skills were too limited to catch the pig and the dragon and the phoenix…

This time of year is good for a visit because of the cherry blossoms!

Cherry Blossoms after Dawn

on Alishan.

Here Comes the Sun

Over the mountains by Alishan.