In my previous article you could read about my experience in Peru. Now I am going to tell you when I went out for a new hiking trip in Taiwan during some bad rainy weather. This hiking trip is one of the most memorable hiking trips in my life, but also one where we were quite lucky.
Start of the hike
When I wake up in the morning I wasn’t even sure if we were going to do this hike. I asked some friends if they wanted to do this hike with me, however the weather was quite bad and the weather forecasts weren’t that much promising either. I just came back to hike the highest mountain in Taiwan so I thought maybe it is better to cancel this trip. However my other 3 friends were really motivated to go so I put on my rain clothes and went to the meeting point.
The beginning of the hike went very well. It was wet, but we walked in a decent speed and the environment was pretty and remote. This all changed when we arrived at the first river that we had to cross. Because of the rain the river was much higher as normal, which makes the crossing way more difficult. The few stones that were still visible were quite slippery as well. I decided to remove my shoes and walk bare foot through the river. However I lost my balance and my shoes slipped out of my hand. The river swallowed my shoes and took them downstream. Luckily was Illia, my friend, alert and fast and was he able to catch my shoes out of the aggressive river.
The first person we saw after 10 hours hiking
New Challenge
After this first crossing we still had two crossings to go. Luckily we won this fight from the river and besides getting extra wet we managed to follow the path. This all changed when we had a new fight. This was our fight with the clock. We were standing in the middle of nowhere and going back wasn’t a solution. Besides that we weren’t sure we were walking on the right track either and it looked that it still took ages before we even would see a glimpse of civilization. We only had one choice at a junction; choose one path and try to walk straight in that direction for as long as possible.
After we made our decision we had to hurry, it was getting dark and it didn’t look we would see anything of civilization soon. If it was totally dark I knew our only choice was to find a way to sleep in the forest because walking in the dark with this slippery weather on the mountain isn’t an option. Our path was steeply going down, which is a good sign because most of the civilization is down hills and luckily we found a road in the end.
Making it home
At least I knew from this point we were safe, we didn’t have to camp in the forest and we only had to follow the road. It still took 30 minutes before we saw the first house, that even looked as a haunted house and after this first house it went quite fast that we arrived in the first village and saw the first fisherman as well. After another hour walking and passing some villages we found the main road with a bus that took us back to Taipei.
While this hiking trip is memorable and was a fantastic journey, I never would do this again. Never do such a long, new hike, in such weather conditions.
Happy to be back
