t.o.t.: February 2016

We met our friends from the States Ray & Jenny for dinner a couple weeks ago. They were planning on going to Ray's hometown in southern Taiwan for Chinese New Year and suggested we went with them. We thought why not, since we'd been staying in Taipei long enough and the thought of going southerly for a change had occurred to us a couple times before.

Jiayi (嘉義) is a mid-size town some 150 miles south of Taipei. It took us about an hour and a half on a high-speed train to get there. We picked up the rental car at the station, then took a short drive to the newly opened National Palace Museum South for visit. This is a contemporary looking structure that hosts regional (South, Northeast and Southeast Asia) and topical (tea, fabrics, religions) exhibits rather than all-China treasures its majestic mother museum up north has been famous for.

We then headed for the little village where Ray grew up and his mother still resides. Though growing up in Taiwan for the first 25 years of my life, this counted as one of the very few times I actually traveled in a little southern Taiwanese town like this. I found the streets wider and straighter and the city itself less cluttered than those bleak and drizzly coastal towns I am used to seeing in northern Taiwan.

Ray's mother is 80 but looked sprightly and treated us with great home cooking including some of her hand-made sausages. After the lunch Ray & Jenny took us for a tour of the town, strolling through his childhood elementary school and the river bank. We then encountered several public posters that tell how the town father Wongs (翁氏家族) emigrated from mainland China and settled here some 300+ years ago and their descendants thrived and became scholars, high officials, doctors and lawyers, etc. I found these stories quite amusing because I am a Wong myself but was born and grew up north in Taipei where my last name was a minority while here the whole town seems to pay utmost tribute to it!

We then headed southeast for a hot-spring resort for our final destination. We checked in a good-size, relatively modern hotel and took a hot soothing bath in the white muddy water that brings special reputation to this place before having a country style dinner--with free range chicken and wild boar meat, I suppose--and going to bed.

Then the earthquake struck, at around 4 AM, they say. With the epicenter just some 60 miles away, this Magnitude 6.4 temblor jolted us wide awake in bed. All things shaking and moving violently, windows chattering, desk jittering... my wife was confused and scared and I thought "wow this is a biggie..." Then it all stopped and went away and we fell asleep again.

We took some short hike up and down the resort area the next morning. Our train ticket was to take us home in the afternoon from the same station we arrived, but we heard from the news and the train's web site that all trains to and from the south were suspended due to that early morning earthquake. So Ray & Jenny drove us up north for about 80 miles to a main station in central Taiwan where it still operated and we boarded the train and went home Taipei safely, ending this short little venturous Chinese New Year excursion of 2016.