Summer Travel Plans

We have had a long-standing plan to meet our friends Kevin and Dawn in a luxurious resort one day. It is actually happening next month – we are meeting in Bali. They are coming from Abu Dhabi and we are coming from Nagoya. Flying from Japan can be really pricey, but we found relatively cheap flights with China Airlines going via Taipei. When I told this to my friend Nancy (who used to live in Taiwan), she looked at me in horror: “You do know that they are the ones that always crash, don’t you?” Yikes! No wonder the tickets were cheap. I did some checking. They don’t actually ALWAYS crash. The morbid website airdisaster.com only has 12 records, and nothing since 2002. They have also now been accredited by IATA so I am hoping that they are no longer dodgy. Anyway, we are about to find out. On Tuesday we fly to Taipei and spend a night there before going on to Bali on Wednesday. We are back a week later and are spending 9 more days in Taiwan and are hoping to do some hiking.

Ah yes. The hiking arrangements. I thought we could just turn up at a mountain with our gear and get walking. Wrong. We need permits. That’s fine, but we can’t work out how to get these permits. We get conflicting information depending on the source. The worst-case scenario is we have to print of the form and fill it out in triplicate identifying our precise itinerary and where we plan to sleep each night. We post this to some office in Taiwan along with a fee and copies of our passports at least a week before we want to hike. I have tried e-mailing them, so we’ll see what happens. There are some amazing-sounding mountain ranges and national parks there. I hadn’t realized that Taiwan was so mountainous. There are dozens of peaks over 3000m. I hope a typhoon doesn’t hit while we are up one of them…