Last year, while we were getting ready for the adventure we are currently on, I realized that the small handbag with the busted zipper I was carting around probably wouldn’t cut it for international travel. St. John’s is the sort of city where you can use your wallet as a placeholder at the bar when you go to the bathroom, but that is certainly not true of everywhere!
Mike was a dear, and presented me with a travel handbag from PacSafe last year for my birthday. This one to be precise:
Mike bought a GoPro recently, and we used it to put together this perspective on scootering in Taiwan. He did the vast majority of the work, but I did some artistic consulting and sometimes the camera’s on my head too! Check it out. It is best viewed in 720p.
It seems that I am still catching up a little with what was going on around the world while we were on vacation. And in this case, I literally mean around the world. In early February, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield performed the song I.S.S. (Is Somebody Singing) with the Barenaked Ladies (BNL) and the Wexford Gleeks, a show choir from Scarborough. The coolest part? Hadfield is currently in space, and he will become the first Canadian commander of the International Space Station this month!
Hadfield and Ed Robertson of the Barenaked Ladies cowrote the song – a commission for the celebration of this year’s Music Monday. Music Monday is a day to celebrate music education, and this year (on May 6 at 1 pm Eastern time), I.S.S. will be performed by students across Canada. But enough from me. If you haven’t heard it already, you really should!
The last leg of our Chinese New Year vacation was in Cambodia. We spent a few days using Siem Reap as a base from which to explore the temples of Angkor, and then took a bus down to Phnom Penh, where we flew home from.
This was the big day of the trip, and the one I was most worried about going wrong. There are so many accounts of other travellers having a tough time with this leg of the typical Southeast Asian tour, and I was determined not to have any trouble if it could be helped. In the end it went off without a hitch!
On February 7, we left Malaysia and hopped onto a flight over to the island of Koh Samui, our first of two destinations during our week in Thailand.
With the arrival of Chinese New Year and a 2 week vacation, Mike and I set out for a whirlwind tour of parts of Southeast Asia. The plan: to fly to Singapore and make our way mostly by surface travel to Phnom Penh, Cambodia over 2.5 weeks. We spent the first week with my dad’s girlfriend Olivia’s family in Malaysia and Singapore before hopping onto a plane to Koh Samui, Thailand for some relaxing on the beach.
With good weather forecast for the weekend and no hot water at home, we decided now was the time to go on our first overnight bike trip here in Taiwan. There’s something really satisfying about travelling away from home under your own power. We chose to head over to the relatively nearby mountain town of Neiwan, home of lots of delicious food, hot spring spas, a suspension bridge and go-karting. It is a very popular day-trip location, yet it has a number of places to stay, so we thought we’d take our chances and see about finding a place for the night once we arrived in town. We had no trouble finding a spot, and ended up staying in a wonderful little B&B type place that overlooked the town.
It took a couple of hours of nice (generally uphill) riding to get into the little mountain town. There were some stretches of road that were a little busy, but it was definitely a popular route for local roadies – we saw many happy cyclists along the way.
Once in Neiwan we rode around for a while looking for the B&B that we wanted to try first. It took a while to find the way, but we made it, and they had room! We showered up, changed into street clothes and hit the Old Street for lunch. We had some brightly coloured rice buns, pork skewers, glutinous rice tamales and some local oranges. Yum! We also bought some spicy peanuts, sesame cookies and a bottle of local honey to take home. After checking out the bridges and the boardwalk, we looked in on the local hot spring spa, thinking a hot bath would be a great way to relax our legs. However, it was a popular spot, with all the private rooms booked for a couple of hours past our arrival time. We decided to get dinner back at the restaurant that was part of our B&B and see if we still felt like the spa after dinner. In the end, I was pretty tired, so we had a couple of beers and enjoyed the scenery from the suspension bridge, and then hit the hay. There is an old theatre-turned-restaurant in town, and it is apparently a beautiful spot for cherry blossoms in the spring, so I’m sure we’ll be back again!
The next day we traveled upstream a little further, before taking an alternate route back to Hsinchu via Beipu. We took far quieter roads, but had a couple of big (category 4) climbs and I was completely cooked by the time we set foot in our apartment. The ride today was the longest I’ve done since we lived in Ontario, and I’m looking forward to logging many more kms and going on a few more overnight trips.
One of the things we wanted to do in Taiwan was explore it by bicycle. We decided, being in the land of Giant and Merida, that we would buy some bikes to ride for the year (and potentially take back to Canada). We always like to pop into local bike stores when we travel, and it was more fun to actually be in the market for new bikes this time! We checked out as many shops as we could in both Hsinchu and Taipei.
After much deliberation we settled on ordering bikes from our local Giant shop in Hsinchu. Mike opted for a TCR Advanced, and I opted for a Defy. The experience was different than what I was used to for my previous two purchases. I was used to large bike stores that carry many sizes in many bikes – you select the one you want, test ride it, and maybe take it home the same day. Our local bike store, Yicheng Bicycle, was a small shop with one of each bike on display, and the shop right out on the floor. Once you’ve decided on a model, Tim, the owner, measures you and orders the bike in the correct size. If you want to see how the geometry feels, then he sets up a fit bike to reflect the measurements of the bike you want. It was a neat thing to try different geometries on the fit bike instead of riding different bikes in stock.
Well, we are firmly into 2013 now, and after quite some thought, I have decided to record some aspirations for the new year. I say aspirations because I would like to set some weekly goals, however I know already that these goals will at times not be met (for example, during our travels at Chinese New Year). That’s ok, I just want to have something recorded I can work toward achieving to the best of my ability.