From Alishan to Dongshi to Chiayi

Yesterday we traveled from Alishan to DongShi for the last evening of our trip. We drove through the highlands of Alishan, which is famous for its exclusive red tea. In Dongshi we were honored as VIPs at the 23.5 Tropic of Cancer festival! BTW, our tour program’s theme was the Tropic of Cancer so it all came together yesterday!

Dongshi is a fishing village and is source of most of the country’s oysters. We saw informal oyster shucking “stations” on the city streets. Baskets of empty oyster shells lines the city streets.

We ate lunch at a place called “spraying water chicken food”. This restaurant is a popular place in the town of Chiayi and is a regional specialty. For lunch we enjoyed such goodies as pig intestines, turkey heart soup, and sautéed oysters in brown sauce!!

We stayed at the Nice Prince Hotel in Chiayi, which was very (as the name suggests) nice!! See the pic of Mr. Chen, our driver, who is posing in front of the hotel. He was great!! The hotel room well equipped with the usual bible etc, but it also had a fire emergency poncho/hood and a flashlight – the Taiwanese are very safety minded!!

One of our favorite things about it was the BAR!! We enjoyed our last tour dinner with Candy, our tourist bureau sponsor and shared some of our ideas on how to market Taiwan to cyclists.