FEATURE
Day 1
First stop of the day, Liyutan (Carp Lake). In the foothills of the central range just southwest of Hualien City, crowded on weekends/holidays, the place comes into its own at other times – our Day 1 was a Monday – when the birds find it quiet enough to come out and sing for you. About 104 hectares in area, this is the east’s largest lake. Among the welldeveloped tourist facilities are a visitor center; pedal-boat, canoe, and motorboatwith-driver rentals; bicycle rentals; a 4km ring road offering pleasant walking/ cycling; camping/picnic areas; easychallenge trails that take you into the hills; and open-air local-style restaurants, where lake shrimp is the big hit. When we visited the lake’s aesthetics were being augmented, inventively, by a giant black rubber duck, in cartoon-style à la Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman’s world-touring giant yellow ducks. Hualien is known for its black duck denizens. When the Japanese controlled Taiwan from 1895 to 1945, they set up 10 immigrant villages in the East Rift Valley. One of the areas of settlement
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is on Fenglin town’s north/northeast side. A cash-crop tobacco industry was launched to help the Japanese immigrants support themselves, and among the best-preserved historical sites are two lovely traditional Japanese-style tobacco buildings, on Darong 2nd Road, used for storage and smoke-roasting. These were actually built later, after the immigrants had gone back home post-WWII, by local families who had learned the trade. Fenglin has the most concentrated, and best-preserved, collection of tobacco barns in Taiwan. History buffs will find even richer reward at Lintian Mountain Forestry Center, southwest of Fenglin town. The center is a former timber-industry village established by the Japanese – my favorite destination in the valley. Located at the
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Travel in Taiwan
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mouth of a central-mountain side valley, this was once Taiwan’s fourth-largest logging operation, with 2,000 residents at its height, and many of the buildings, built with Chinese cypress, have been beautifully restored. There is a history center, remnants of the extensive railway and cableway systems that ran high into the hills, train, machinery, and other displays, plus many informative English signboards.