“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…

Here Comes the Sun

Over the mountains by Alishan.