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Yet Another Super Typhoon Approaches Taiwan
Oh yeah, and another one is lining up for the kill….

Update: Another beautiful satellite image that I wanted to share with you.

We already have tons of rain, and the storm is still very far away! I think this is going to be bad.

The photo to the left is an IR satellite view of the Pacific Ocean centered on Guam and clearly shows this well developed storm heading our way. The cool thing about this URL link to the photograph is that it is constantly being updated. Refreshing this page will give you the latest satellite photo.
This is yet another killer typhoon which is threatening us. A few weeks ago another storm tore up much of Taiwan, leaving a nice wake of destruction. In my own apartment complex, a very large steel basketball backstop was blown into the garden by winds. I am unable to even budge this backstop with all my might, its that heavy. It took several weeks for the complex management to get some equipment to put it back into place (I did not get photos of the backstop in the garden for some reason). Dear Reader, I promise that this time I will get you photographs of whatever this thing does to our neighborhood. You will of course notice that another tropical storm is brewing right behind this one….

Last August a typhoon named AERE decided that the landscape needed re-arranging, and so it whipped things around and made quite a mess. These shots are taken not very far from where I live. I was riding a scooter and came upon this damage (good thing I had my Nikon with me)

First, it did things like this small landslide. Then it went onto destroy the road. There was so much water in the flood plain that it undercut the embankment and the concrete retaining wall broke away, which let the road slip off the ledge. Not pretty.

In the second shot you can clearly see how the road just fell off the ledge it was built upon when the retaining wall gave way.

You could drive your car or truck right off the road and into the drink if you weren’t paying attention.

A year later this section is still not quite fully restored but it is safe to travel on this road.

Official stats on Typhoon Aere

Yeah, yeah, I know – its been almost a month since we were in China and Hong Kong and we still haven’t posted any new photos. I had to move out of my apartment and into a new one because there was a major problem with a water leak in one of the walls. Things have been hectic otherwise but Hui-Chen and I will be able to go through some of the shots and post them for September (that way they won’t be archived right away into August).

Before we actually get to those shots I wanted to show you these 2 shots first:

This one, taken in March, 2004 shows me standing by a marker on the Black Dragon River. The ice behind me is about 2 meters thick, and vehicles crossing the river are not so rare, even though it is an international border. In the background you can see the Russian Republic. I am wearing military-issue wool pants and my Cabela’s bush jacket along with my trusty New Zealand river guide hat.

This shot taken in August of 2005 is the same area, with the same marker, only closer up (which explains why the entire background is washed out white). Its not often that people have a chance to return to such a rare place and take the same basic photograph they had taken in the past, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. I am wearing a nice Thai silk shirt, and drawstring pants (with the stupid string showing). I have the same hat as before but it has suffered from considerable wear. I replaced the lariat with a leather thong but typically leather doesn’t last that long for me. The hat also has a ventilation grommet missing on the top. People around the world frequently stop and ask me where I bought my hat, if there are any for sale locally, and will I sell mine to them! Here is a list of the countries where that hat has been:

Made in New Zealand and imported to the US, where I purchased it in 2002. Then, it has been with me to:

Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong, China, Malaysia (Borneo), Thailand and Laos. Please note that I have been to several of these locations multiple times so that hat has enough flier miles to quality for a free ticket!

Let’s face it – I am an experience junky. This is what we do!

is when people are unreasonable. I seem to be faced with unreasonableness just about everywhere I travel in Asia. It has to do with the differences between cultures. Today’s story is about a place we ate at last night in Taichung.

I got one of those “set” meals which begins with salad and goes through several courses. These guys forgot my soup. By the end of the meal I didn’t want it. The waitress basically gave us the “too bad” speech and walked away. Hui-Chen had to break bad and get them to take some money off of the bill, but, it took so much stupid talking that I wanted to shoot myself.

This is the place in Taichung that was unreasonable. Its supposedly a Spanish restaurant in the same way that Taco Bell is supposed to be “Mexican”.

I know we promised you Hong Kong & China more than 2 weeks ago. The reason we haven’t posted the shots from that last trip is because Hui-Chen is away on her own in south Taiwan. Many of the shots we post on the blog are taken by her as well as myself. She also likes to have input on the commentary and information I add to the photographs in the posts. We have been considering doing some bi-lingual commentary so watch future posts for Chinese language content for our Chinese-speaking readers. But, I digress. Hui-Chen is returning this weekend and as soon as she has some free time we will go through the several hundred photos we took and pick out the best ones for you. We have some pretty funny stories to tell, like the Mother who asked me if her 2 sons could pose with me, because they never saw an American before. Little did Mother know that I would tell the kids (in Chinese) to hold their hands like pistols, hehe. After all, they did want to pose with an American, right?

OK, now onto today’s post:
More Taiwan Straight: Morning Bicycle Ride to The Coast

Morning Ride To The Taiwan Straight: 2 hours to and fro. 07:00 to 09:00. The Straight reminds me of Florida as a kid. We lived in St. Petersburg on the west coast. Sun rose on the land and set in the water, just like here.

Closeup of Hsinchu City in the distance. This city hosts the world-famous Science Park high-technology industrial area. Some of the world’s hottest new technologies come right out of that spot in the middle of this shot. You can see it thanks to the engineers at Nikon.

Behind me you can see that the coast takes at real beating from incoming wind and waves. Typhoons are frequent in Taiwan and this area is not immune to the effects.

The Straight has a great deal of shipping traffic. I can often see several container or tanker ships from the window in my apartment.

This map created with my (GPS aware!) Taiwan mapping software shows a line-of-sight rhumb line from my apartment on the edge of Hukou to the local water park. Today’s ride was very close to that park, just north where you see the small “cut.” According to this map, the line is exactly 8.87km long. Altogether I rode about 15km. A nice lazy ride over 2 hours.

Along the way is a huge temple which is very large and impressive looking.

A shot inside the gate shows this interesting feature with children on top.

One thing that I must point out is, I am unfamilar with the belief systems here. My photographs and descriptions are meant to be informative and not demeaning or disrespectful whatsoever. I am open to correction on any such points you see in this blog.

There is also a rather happy looking fellow, holding a large piece of gold money.

And, believe it or not, this temple sports not one, but two dinosaurs! Yeah I know this shot is annoying, but I didn’t want to ride my bike up close to the temple out of respect.

Now this isn’t the first time we’ve seen dinosaurs at temples in Asia. This shot taken in Thailand (by Hui-Chen) shows a large model of a dinosaur at the front corner of the temple. Dinosaurs were discovered in Thailand fairly recently (see this article in the June archives for more on dinosaurs in Thailand) and the Thais are very proud of this fact, so its common to see dino models in many places. I have no idea why dinosaurs are on the Taiwanese temple property however.

This evening I went up on the roof to cool off and relax. It’s hard to take this kind of scenery, day after day. It’s hard because when I travel other places I always compare them with Taiwan and there is no comparison….

Beautiful Taiwan Sunset: Facing West, looking past the Chinese High Technology University out over the Taiwan Straight.

Personal friends of the Bushman will attest that my favorite drink is whisky and coke. Today I discovered that the local 7-11 carries the latest addition to the line of Crusiers, the Whisky Cola!

Here you see an example of the latest flavor in the Cruiser family available locally: Whisky Cola! Its been properly opened and sampled. This is my 3rd one actually.!

I noticed on the website that the company offers a Bourbon Cruiser! Oh yeah! These guys got it going on man!