Day 42 - Walking Across The Windy Longpan Grassland Plateau, The Long Walk South In Taiwan
Day 42 - Walking Across The Windy Longpan Grassland Plateau, The Long Walk South In Taiwan
The kind staff at our accommodation prepared for us a light breakfast of vegetable rice paper rollups, fruit and mini croissants.
We ate only the rollups and fruit, and packed the mini croissants to eat for lunch later.
On this pilgrimage, I stopped worrying about what we would eat for lunch, because we were rarely hungry at lunchtime, and mostly ate at a rest stop to give ourselves a break from walking.
But we do drink a lot of water, and seeing that we will have no shops of any sort until we were already over the plateau, I packed lots of water.
I packed 1.5 liters for each of us, which is more than we ever took for one day on this pilgrimage.
Usually we only carried one bottle per person or at most two, amounting to one liter each.
I know that it is not a lot for walking in the heat, but we have always been provided for, either by people who stopped to cheer us on and gave us bottles of water, or by finding small shops.
Knowing that we had lots of water put me at ease, and I could concentrate on enjoying the hike, instead of conserving water all day and worrying about how we could get more water.
Jules doesn’t share my belief about carrying lots of water.
He believes that we should just drink less.
But for me, it is a metaphor for saving and having lots of money.
It is better to have more than enough money put aside, so you don’t have to worry about having enough, when and if circumstances arise where you need money.
It is a bad idea to have just enough to cover your expenses plus a little bit extra.
It creates anxiety and stress and in the long run, creates a mentality of limitations, where a person does less in life, but never understands that it is a result of worrying about money or where it will come from next.
From our accommodation, it was a steep uphill to get to the plateau.
We saw the various modern hotels that dot the grasslands, all with beautiful views of the Pacific Ocean.
The grassland prairie was beautiful and it stretched out in all directions.
Because it gets seriously strong winds, there was only dwarf vegetation growing in the area.
There were dwarf date palms and other varieties of tropical plants, including some varieties of cacti, that like warm weather and salt air, and can withstand the strong winds.
And strong winds is what we encountered.
We had some stretches where the wind was not so strong, and in other parts the wind was blowing sand from the dunes, right into our faces.
The sand felt like shards of glass and it stuck to our sweaty faces.
When I wiped my face, it felt like a face scrub.
I saw a wild monkey in the bushes on the mountainside.
It looked at me with curiosity, but didn’t make any moves or gestures, so I concluded that it was neither frightened nor trying to scare me away.
We saw many other people who had come to see the grassland.
They all stopped at the designated parking area and walked along the wooden boardwalk to take pictures and see the beaches below.
Many people also came in big tour buses.
After we walked through the grassland, it was a steep downhill to sea level.
It was a very beautiful and scenic walk all day.
The pacific coastline looked so much like the California coast between LA and San Francisco.
Across from the shoreline, we saw a few more good looking accommodations, but still no stores of any kind.
My map showed that there was a cafe in a small village, a few kilometers down the road.
It was a tiny cool cafe, that was owned by a pretty Taiwanese girl married to a young German man.
The cafe had a big outdoor space, but inside it had only a bar by the windows with four stools.
But they did have oat milk for lattes and a delicious homemade kombucha, along with a tasty but very tiny cheesecake.
I was happy to sit down and I took off my shoes to clean them, because a lot of sand had blown into them during our walk.
I am not exaggerating when I say that I removed about a tablespoon of sand from each shoe.
The rest of the walk was inland and away from the ocean.
It was a dragon fruit growing area and we passed by many fields, all heavily fenced and with guard dogs who were barking at us from a distance, before we had even passed by the fields.
There were no shops in any of the tiny villages we passed, and I hoped to buy something we could eat for dinner, because there were no places to eat near our guesthouse.
As we walked, Jules said that walking this pilgrimage would have been so much more difficult, if we didn’t have all those convenience stores spread across the country.
We did pass by one local shop.
The door was open, but the lady owner was sleeping on a bench in the back, snoring calmly.
I circled inside her dusty store, and still she didn’t wake up.
Finally she woke up, surprised to see a foreigner in her store.
The store had almost nothing to eat if you didn’t have a kitchen to cook noodles or rice in.
I finally found two packages of vegan instant noodles, which only required adding boiling water to the bowls.
I checked the expiration dates, dusted them off and bought them along with a package of salty crackers.
A few kilometers later, we arrived at our guesthouse.
There was nobody there and no phone number was listed on the gate or the door.
I called the phone number on our reservation and luckily the lady who answered spoke enough English to tell me that it is a “Self check in guesthouse” and gave me our room number.
We had already paid, so she said that she would come in the morning to bring us a vegetarian breakfast and tea.
The room was comfortable and the shower was hot, so we slept well and washed our clothes by hand and hung them up to dry.
They had a TV and I followed the news about another typhoon that was heading our way in southeastern Taiwan.
Tomorrow, a group of friends will be joining us on our walk, and we are scheduled to walk together for four days.
I felt guilty for inconveniencing them to come all the way south, only to possibly not be able to walk because of the typhoon.
I sent messages to our friend Wendy, but she replied that they did not want to cancel, and that they would be coming anyway.
It will be interesting to see what happens….
With love,
Tali
Today’s Stats:
Steps - 21,324
Daily Distance - 15 km
Total Distance To Date - 655 km
