After a long flight we finally arrived in Taiwan. We didn`t really know what`s expecting us in Taiwan, we just knew that we are going to travel in a Van, which turned out to be a pretty good idea. We got one big bagpack and one big surfbag. We wanted to go in our homestay, but the friendly women at the Taoyuan airport told us that it is not possible to travel with a surfbag in a train or the metro. We had to get a bus and hope that the busdriver let us in, because this was also not sure. As the bus was not really on time, we had to wait for almost 2 hours. At the end it was not a problem at all to take it to the bus and we could finally go to our homestay. We spent 2 days exploring the town there, before we headed south to pick up our lovely van in Taichung. This trip we did by train, so we let our luggage in the homestay, drove all the way back with the van and picked it up.
Ready to start our adventure. We drove straight to the east coast, as it’s known for it’s beatiful landscape and surfing. After a long drive we ended up parking in some random parking lot somewhere in Yilan next to the ocean. After being 4 Months in Indonesia eating rice everyday, we were super excited to cook by our own and make a huge pasta.
After visiting Wufengqi Waterfall the next day we headed south to Dongao Bay, and parked our Van on an empty parking lot above the bay, knowing waking up to a super nice view the next morning. While doing breakfast a guy drove by, super excited to see foreign people, but not speaking one word of english. He saw an empty beer bottle next to our van, left, and came back 10minutes later with a sixpack of beer. It was 10 am, I just had breakfast and as i didn’t want to be unpolite, i drank a beer with him. Then he showed us the place around, constantly wanted to buy us food, for example these small saussages you can find everywhere in Taiwan on these street food corners. We couldn’t really communicate, but it was still nice to have our own guide.
We drove further south to find some waves, but we got into a storm and it rained pretty heavy. We stopped driving and parked our van somewhere out in the nowhere next to a beach and waited till we had a chance to cook our food. Not always easy to find a good place to sleep in the dark in a place you never have been to. We realized that we actually were not really prepared well for bad weather, so we just ended up playing cards in our bed and waited more. At around 10pm we had a short window where it was not pouring like hell so we did a quick pasta and went to sleep.
The next day we realized starting to be a bit smelly, after we didn’t have a shower for couple of days. So we found ourselves a waterfall using as our shower. We went to Jiyue waterfall. There was absolutely no one so we had our own little paradise. If there is less water, you can use the waterfall as a waterslide too, but the current was to strong so we just had a bath and washed ourselves. People say living in a van is to renounce on a lot of comfort. But using a waterfall as a shower and having your home wherever you want, means so much freedom and you realize how less you need to live happily.
