Trip to Ilan 1

On the break between semesters, I took a trip to the East coast of Taiwan with two of Florence's older brothers.

Taipei -> Ilan -> SuAo ->  Jiaosi -> Keelung -> Taipei


For the Lee family in Taipei, their ancestoral home is in Ilan, so there are lots of relatives still there. My brothers-in-law grew up in Ilan.

We started with a bus out of Taipei thru the XueShan Mountain Tunnel. This was a major engineering accomplishment of a 13km(8 miles).  It cost more that half a billion dollars and 25 lives and took 15 years from 1991-2006.But it now conveniently connects East and West Taiwan in the North. The development of Ilan has lagged the rest of Taiwan but now Ilan is starting to grow much faster.

I has the front seat in the tour bus:

In Ilan, Florence's sister brought us to the National Center for Traditional Arts.

Then for lunch we went to the port of SuAo, in a fishing port like SuAo I suppose I shouldn't have been so surprised that the seafood was the best I've had so far in Taiwan.

The fishing boats are arrayed with these lights for attracting fish and shrimp.

The fishing boat has to have some serious electical potential to keep these babies running:

The lights attract the fish/shrimp. I guess this is just like advertising for human buyers, they put out something with the promise of sex and then they hook you.