This is a personal account from a satisfied customer, the only one in fact, but that is beside the point, who experienced A Tour of Yuanlin, offered by Dion's Taiwan Tours, specialists in extreme travel adventures of small Taiwanese towns.

You confidently board the train back to Kaohsiung, scared stiff that you will miss the correct stop, either by falling asleep or by not recognising the squiggles on the scrap of paper you hold in your hand. You valiantly fight off the sleep you so desperately need and peer out of the musty windows and every station looking for similar squiggles. A long while later you pull into a large station and for the only time in the whole trip the intercom spouts perfect American English "Kaohsiung station. Get off here for Kaohsiung airport". Your heart sinks as you think of all the sleep you just missed in vain.

You walk boldly through the station and are accosted by a taxi driver who whips your bag from your hand before can say ping ying and are treated to thirty minutes of him chewing leaves and some strange fruit, spitting the remnants out the windows, but missing the open part. With relief you step into the international atmosphere of the airport with its English signs and symbols, knowing you are about to board a plane for an apparently backward version (according to true Taiwanese) version of Taiwan.

Thankfully, the four weeks you spend there corrects this huge error and you learn that despite the divide of the water and the thick mist of smog that separates the two "Chinas", they are of the same ilk, just as beautiful, just as interesting, just as much an eye opening influence on your life!!!

22 August 2002

Erik Harvey

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