Jiji to Chiayi

November 14, 2024

A fabulous day of bike touring

A farm stay did us good. We all had best sleep of the trip, a solid 9 hours.

The owners were kind to move breakfast from the normal 8 am until 7 am so we could start biking earlier. We enjoyed a fabulous huge meal. My first congee ever, with potatoes in it. Also fried eggs, tofu, cabbage, broccoli, pickles, and oranges.

We started biking under blue skies at 7:40. We had chosen to ride a moderately hilly route to Chiayi. We could have chosen a route with almost no climbing, or one that was a lot tougher.

Our bikes spent the night outside. This is just heavy dew, I think.

The driveway to our cabin was too steep to ride up.

Our delicious breakfast spread. We’re getting used to having a big feed of veggies at breakfast time.

The very special view from the top of the driveway.

This seems to be a typical residential street, with street level parking, and no yard to speak of, but often potted plants.

We passed lots of tea today. This farm was being sprayed with chemicals. We didn’t hang around.

Our route was great today. Lots of things growing, and not much traffic.

Komoot routed us through a very interesting market street.

This vendor gave us crunchy/juicy apples that don’t look like our apples. But they were delicious!

Traffic on the market street was very busy, so we walked our bikes.

Things we saw growing today: ginormous avocados, tea, guava, oranges, dragon fruit, corn, some sort of squash, pineapples, and more tea. We also saw domesticated geese and ducks in big ponds, and monkeys near the top of our climb.

We ate some fruit at a temple gazebo near the base of our largest climb of the day. But I haven’t seen other people sitting around like we did. Taiwan definitely is not a sitting around culture, at least not in public. We keep stopping at 7-Eleven because there aren’t other rest places visible en route. That included stopping for ice cream with a few kilometres to go. We had an excellent Japanese waffle/ice cream combo.

All in all, it was a fabulous biking day that ended with a downhill run into the traffic mayhem of Chiayi at about 3 pm. We stayed at a really nice hotel near the night market.

We enjoyed beer and salty snacks while we waited to access our rooms at 4.

Then we had dinner at two Netflix famous locations, from the Street Food series. One restaurant served turkey rice, which is good but fairly bland. And then we had a bowl of fish head soup, which was very tasty despite the off-putting appearance of a giant deep fried fish head in the bowl. There were some tasty fish morsels in the head.

Bike-wise, I had a response from a helpful SRAM dealer via email. Unlike in North America, they sell the wee part that’s broken in my shifter. They found a bike shop in Kaohshiung and let me know that if I’m there by 3 pm on Saturday, they’ll fix my shifter. The shop is a bit out of the way, but it’ll be great if it can get the shifter repaired. It acted up a bit today, even though I tried not to use it much. It shifts fine into easier gears (except no granny), but doesn’t want to shift back down again.

Today's ride: 78 km (48 miles)
Total: 408 km (253 miles)

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Rachael AndersonThat’s great news about getting your shifter fixed!
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5 days ago

Scott AndersonIt’s been five years now, but I was surprised at how much I liked Kaoshiung. If you have the time, check out Monkey Moutain.
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5 days ago