TW East coast - Taitung

Hey Everybody!

We're still in Taiwan and doing well. We finally got to take a little trip at the end of May. The Taiwanese work a lot, so we won't have many opportunities like this. We had a four day holiday and decided to head to the East coast.

Taiwan's east coast is the less developed side of the island due to the large, steep mountains (several peaks over 12,000 feet) and the typhoons experienced each year. There's also a large indigenous population of various tribes.

The trip was great. The city of Taitung was our base. We spent a good amount of time at the beach. There's only a few swimable beaches on the east coast, so we were lucky to be near one. The water and currents can be rather violent and in many place the mountains drop right into the ocean. It's beautiful.

The pictures from the trip speak for themselves. As for Claire and I, we are doing well. We've got a scooter, we're used to our new school and the students, we're doing Chinese lessons and saving money. Chiayi City is certainly not as exciting as Chiang Mai, Thailand was, but it's very livable. We're at the base of a forest recreation area and the huge mountains, so it's easy for us to escape into the tropical wilderness on the weekends.

Now that we've got money rolling in we'll be hitting up various spots in Taiwan via their excellent train system. I believe we'll hit Taipei in another week or so. At the end of June we will also be visiting the Philippines for a week. One our friends and co-workers is originally from the island, so it's sure to be a nice look inside Philippino life.

We'll do our best to keep the blogs and pics coming. Also, Claire and I realized we generally take crappy pictures...it's sad, but we can't be good at everything. Our apologies.

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