Fenchihu

Friday, after lunch and after contemplating, with a Starbucks latte in my hand, how the clouds completely covered the mountain that dominates the view from the Alishan station, which rather seems an enormous wall just there, we boarded the train that would take us to the next stage of the outing: Fenchihu, located halfway on the way down.

If Alishan has its own charm, Fenchihu's look is that of a typical Taiwan village, with the agglomeration of houses, corrugated plates and shops. Apart from discovering a nice little cafè, we also made a couple of nice little tours. One was to see the forests of bamboo and coniferous trees that are typical of the place. The bamboo tree forest is really impressive, and I am afraid that pictures fall way short.


Looking at all those bamboo trees —which according to our guide, grow very fast: they are very tall in just 40 days&mdash extending up to the sky, it seemed as if we had entered some kind of very tall and transparent gothic cathedral. I was overcome by a feeling of lightness difficult to describe. It was probably due to the crossing of so many straight thin lines that grow so high.


The transition to the coniferous trees forest is absolutely sudden; it is probably made on purpose. We also saw an area with square trunk bamboo trees the next morning. Really strange.

We went to see fireflys that night. They were similar to the ones I had seen in Columbus, but with a pulsating light. They looked like airplanes in the sky. And not much more, some beers with the japanese contingent afterwards. The next morning, we made a little tour through another pine-tree forest, with giant rocks covered with moss, plants that grew at middle height from the trunk of tress

and other oddities, but rain, that had spared us for a day and half, started with a vengeance and it was time to run for cover, return to the hotel and wait for the midday train that would take us back to Chiayi. It did not stop raining during the next seven or eight hours. Typical.