From the first moments this tour was both frustrating and hilarious because no one spoke English and no one cared that we didn't speak Mandarin. There were no attempts to include us in any of the conversations, which is something we've never experienced before. The van driver was our tour guide and spoke the whole time, probably doling out fantastic historical facts and anecdotes about the area. He kept stopping the van and everyone would get out and take pictures of random things. We had no idea what was happening. We signed up for a sunrise tour. We didn't know it incorporated random stops along the way. We were so confused.
At this stop we figured two things out: one, we figured out that we were stopped to get our picture in front of this sign and two, we figured out that the family that was seated behind us in the van spoke English. They were from Macau, a Special Administrative Region of China (just like Hong Kong) and spoke English very well. Unfortunately, either due to the traditionally humble nature of the Chinese regarding their language skills or perhaps simply not knowing that we spoke English because we had been absolutely silent the whole trip, except for the "bu ming by" Desi said to tell everyone we didn't understand them, they had kept this bit of information to themselves for over an hour and now that we knew that we had comrades in the van our tour guide had stopped talking. Nice.
We eventually arrived at the sunrise viewing spot, which was packed with other sunrise viewers. We stood in the freezing cold for at least 15 minutes waiting for the sun to come up. When it finally did rise we must admit it was nice. At sunrise you experience everything about the sun in increments. First the light and then the heat. It was nice to take a few minutes to pay our respects to something we typically take for granted. However, we've since determined that the experience was not worth the effort. We'd rather pay our respects at sunset than sunrise. If anyone asks, we're sunset people. No one has to wake up early for a sunset.
After returning to Alishan Village we checked out of our hotel and waited for our bus back to Chiayi (the green van pictured below).
When we got back to Kaohsiung we rested for a bit (camping can really be exhausting) and then headed out for a group dinner at the food court in the Dream Mall. Since we hadn't experienced a Taiwanese mall yet, after getting Coldstone Creamery for dessert, we let Chad, May and the kids head back home while we did some window shopping. We concluded that the night markets of Taiwan are a far better deal and experience than the mall was. After a few minutes we began our walk back to Chad & May's.
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