This weekend, after a long, exhausting, unorganized, and somewhat frustrating week of working 12/13-hour days, another teacher (Whitney – also my roommate now) and I decided to get out of this city, Tainan, and go somewhere in nature to relax a bit. Our priorities were:
1. Nature
2. Relaxing
3. Away from children.
For me, being around nature is one of the most relaxing things. It does wonders for my soul…

So, after much debating (there were lots of wonderful choices… beaches, islands, mountains), we decided on Guanziling – a town not too far away in the mountains with a natural hotspring… This is the view from the hotsprings. Beautiful.

They have several muddy hotspring pools of different temperatures where you can relax. You can also get a free hotsprings facial… First you put mud from the springs on your face and let it sit for a while. Next you put green smashed soy bean. Lastly, a concoction of apple and flour. Sounds crazy. But our faces felt so nice afterwards. Unfortunately, due to the humid climate, that nice feeling of a clean face didn’t last longer than an hour.

The other thing Guanziling is known for is its special cave where natural gas causes a large flame of fire to dance over a pool of water. We decided to walk up the mountain to find the cave. Surely it couldn’t be far… Right? Wrong. Wrong, wrong, and wrong again.

We hiked along winding roads for several kilometers through rainforest. The view got more and more beautiful the further up we went. Outside of the noise of an occasional motorbike, we were surrounded by noises of the rainforest. And I’m almost positive we were hearing monkeys! It was crazy. Beautiful, yet creepy. The rainforest is creepy. Let’s be honest… There are some other-worldly things there…

As we were walking along, Whitney screamed and jumped suddenly… I looked down. And we saw what looked like a giant red spider. A tarantula of some kind? I grabbed my camera to take a picture and snapped one quickly. But I realized I needed to change some settings… I quickly changed what I needed to. I warily got closer for a picture. I was jumpy, because I still thought it was a huge spider, and there was this fear of “what if it jumps towards me while my eye is to the camera and I don’t notice until it’s on me, and it’s already bitten me… and then I’m gonna die, because we’re already in the middle of the freaking rainforest”… Before I could take the picture, I jumped and screamed a little unintentionally. It was one of those… you don’t expect to scream. But it just sort of comes out. So you start laughing afterwards. Anyway… the poor little crab starts scurrying away. We realize at this point that it’s not a spider at all. But a crab. A crab? In the jungle? What?! So, this is the best picture I got of it, because it ran away before I could get a good picture. Ohhhhh, the rainforest. I like it, but it makes me so jumpy. Maybe I shouldn’t go to the Malaysian rainforest like I was planning. I may have seen enough.

After quite a while of hiking uphill, we came across a fork in the road. We still hadn’t reached the cave, though at least now we were seeing signs that we THINK pointed towards the cave (they were in Chinese, so who can be sure?). So, we stopped for a minute… trying to decide if it was worth trekking on to see the fire/water phenomenon. A man on a bicycle who spoke english passed by and stopped to ask if we were lost. He told us that the cave was at least another 3 kilometers UP the mountain. So… we decided to turn around. Not only because we were tired, but also because we needed to be back at the bus station to catch the last bus to town, otherwise, we would pretty much be stuck…. they told us it was really hard to get a taxi where we were.

We caught the last bus to the town and had a great view of the sunset on our way down. So beautiful. I think it was my first Asian sunset to capture on camera. When we got to the train station, we saw that our train was delayed. We waited for the next one… But as we got on, we realized these were all reserved seats… NOT the generic kind that we had tickets for. We were very confused, because we were pretty sure we were on the right platform, going the right direction. And the time of the train matched the time our TA friends had told us it would be.

Then, to make matters worse, I lost my ticket… See, when you take a train, you have to slide your ticket through a machine in order to both enter the train station and to leave the train station. So you can’t get out without your ticket. And mine magically disappeared somehow and somewhere between the time that I entered the Xinying train station and the time I got on the train.

When we arrived back at the Tainan station, we went to the ‘fare adjustment’ windown and tried to explain our problem. The guy kept speaking really fast in Chinese. It was clear we didn’t understand a word that he was saying, but he kept on talking. He grabbed a paper and was saying and writing stuff, but we still had no clue. Finally he just wrote 40. I still am not sure what he meant, but I just handed him 40 Taiwanese dollars (a little over $1 USA), and he let us go. I’m still not quite sure what happened. Haha.

Anyway, it was such a wonderful way to spend our Saturday. We needed to get away so badly. To have some kind of adventure and see some kind of nature and be away from children.