Sabbath - Biking

After a good, but tiring, week of teaching I felt the need to stretch and see some new sights. I gathered some essentials: a rain jacket, mp3 player, bananas, water, and a map. Feeling prepared, I headed out to Guandu. It takes about two hours to get out there. First it's an hour from Shenkeng to Taipei City Hall, then another 45 minutes by MRT to Guandu. Once there I visited a bike rental shop that I had used once before. She got me hooked up with a Giant mountain bike and paddlelock and took my ID and 100 NT (note to self, I discovered through a cute girl at the shop, whom I think was her daughter, that it is only 100 NT for the whole day! This is about $3 - not to shabby). Okay, so Giant has factories here and thus bikes are accessible at a fare price, but how they sell so many mountain bikes is beyond me - I'm quite certain most of the riders in Taiwan use the extensive paved trail system, which does not call for extra tread.

Back to my day. So I hopped on my bike and scadoodled along. This trip I had planned to head North and ride to Bali (last time I had gone South). The first leg of my ride was the most interesting. Heading on the trail to Bali was cool because it took you right through boat yards, had occasional coffee shops and restaurants for bikers, and even brought you right into a busy little market area that sat along the river.

Once I made it to Bali I kept going and traveled passed several large ports. I was near the major highway and assumed the path would follow it in some fashion even further North (I wanted to go for a while to get a feel of how the path was in areas with no cities near by). Well, that's when it ended. At least I assumed that riding on a major road was not the bike path. It had only taken 40 minutes to get to the ocean (much faster than I had guessed it would) and 60 minutes to run out of trail! I pulled out one of my essentials and ate it, another essential and played it, and one last essential and stared at it. This last essential told me that I should turn around and explore some other paths. So I turned around, re-traced my path back towards Guandu.

I ended up following the left bank (Guandu is on the right bank) to the Taipei Bridge then crossed over to some finger that is split by two rivers - I then accidentally took the long way around to another bridge that got me to the right bank. I then headed back to Guandu. Total time: 6 hrs.

Sorry no pictures. For some reason "Camera" did not make it onto my essentials list (kicking self).

-Andrew