A couple of months ago I was sad to find that I didn't have any pictures of the motorbike that I drove in Taiwan. But, Kevan used it to drive around when he visited us there, and he sent me this picture yesterday. That's a nice bike. Well, it's kind of a ridiculous bike... but it was lent to me for as long as I needed it. 
Children S, formally the notorious Children X class... When I first got this class I dreaded teaching them every week, but after a few months of tough "Aaron teacher" love, they came around nicely and became my favourite children's class.
Front Row Left: Henry Lin, Tina, Crazy George (frontmost), Brother and Sister Joe and Sharon, and Eric.
Middle Row Left: Henry Zhou, Judy, Karch (it becomes a name after you yell "KARCH BE QUIET!" about fifty times), New Kid, Candy, and Ella.
Back Pair: Brother and Sister John (the one with the speech impediment) and Penny.
Here is my baby class... I love these guys. They get so excited they jump on me during story time, give me spontaneous hugs, and follow me everywhere before class. So cute.
Here are a few of the hard core adult club students. From the left there's Jane, quiet girl, Karen, Peter (Koala's number one student), and Jack.
And finally Langer, who is handsome.
Sorry about the lack of postings. I have been really busy preparing to leave for Thailand on the morning of March 2nd.
Blender - 100 NT
A pot for instant noodles! - 50 NT
Fan - 150 NT
A reading lamp with no lamp shade... you can make one! Think of it as an art project - 20 NT
Shower curtain and rod - 100 NT
Got up at 600 am for a quick bike/hike up to the summit of a little peak with a view of Jade Mountain (YuShan). At 3952 meters, it is the tallest mountain in north east Asia. At 2854 meters, we were still way under it. Above is a bad pic of the sunrise over a cloud covered Jade Mountain.
It was somewhere around zero that morning, and frost covered the ground. 
From here we biked down the mountain towards PuLi, passing Sun Moon Lake - what must be Taiwan's number one tourist destination among local tourists - in the early afternoon.
From PuLi we 
This is a picture of the homestay we stayed at. What a great place. You can see the pools down near the river. A perfect place for a vacation I think. Quiet gardens, and a great Philippino couple with fluent english doing the cooking and cleaning.
And a picture of the springs... 
Near 2000 meters, the betel palms started to give way to more and more tea fields and natural forest.
Finally in the early afternoon, we got to ALiShan. ALiShan is famous for it's huge old trees that the Japanese didn't quite get to cutting down. Some of these cypress trees are thousands of years old. Nice.
Mist engulfed Alishan in the late afternoon both times I have visited. It's a beautiful and mystical place.
They've built these great elevated walkways through a couple of the groves with the oldest and biggest trees.
From here we made for YuShan, because accommodation is crazy expensive in Alishan. It was 20 km up to the top of the road where another ShanZhuang awaited. We got there, just before dark. The aboriginal owners were really good to us, likely because they thought we were very stupid to be up on the mountain with no reservations, no food, and no parkas. We had already resigned ourselves to the fact that we would be dining on pao mien, but the owners managed to fit us in for dinner with a huge group of very nice Taiwanese tourists. They were really really nice. They prayed before eating dinner, which is one of the most strange and unexpected things I have ever seen in Taiwan (second only to strippers at temple dedications). Turns out they were all Jehovah's Witnesses. Very strange indeed. Fortunatley, no copies of the watchtower changed hands, and fine hot dinner was enjoyed by all.
The entrance to a busy town with some famous temple or another. It made for a busy road the first 10 km or so.
Though he meant well, Brett offends local sensibilities by pointing at GuanYin, the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy. Ok, really he was indicating the road's course around that hump over GuanYin's left shoulder.
After that busy town, things got quiet. It was all betel nut plantations mixed in with tea fields. A perfect ride.
In this area, almost every mountain side was stripped of jungle and replaced with vast betel plantations. This is obviously a big environmental problem in Taiwan. Riding through a stand of betel palms you notice that the air is hot, dry, and quiet; In the jungle a couple hundred meters down the road the air is cooler, humid, and teeming with insects and birds.
Betel Palms in the foreground and tea fields in the back.
In the late afternoon, we found this great little ShanZhuang (Mountain Hostel) that let us camp for 100 NT each. The mountains in the background foreshadowed what Friday had in store.
Actually, it wasn't that bad. The weather was good, and most of the tourists stayed off the beaches and in the market (which consisted of stalls on the side of the highway).
In Taiwanese culture, death by drowning - along with being murdered or committing suicide - is one of the worst ways to go. People who succumb to such a horrible fate are doomed to wander as a hungry ghost in some kind of earthly purgatory. Suffice it to say Taiwanese people generally don't really like water. Getting a sun tan isn't good either (more to come on this later), so most people spend their time on the beach fully clothed sitting under umbrellas.
Most of the southern coastline is covered in this beautiful petrified coral. My co-worker Robert had to spend a couple nights in the hospital over Chinese New Year after he was thrown up against some of this stuff while surfing on the south-east coast. Ouch.
To be honest, most of these pictures were taken last year when I visited KenDing with my parents in early April. The sky was clearer, so the light was perfect. The second one really was taken this time though.
AnDongNi and A-Chun up front on road bikes.
Way down south through banana fields and rice paddies.
Waiting around at an important intersection. The sign on the far left is our eventual destination.
A nice old house on the side of the road.
We started off crazy early Monday morning at the bike shop for a 300 km drive down Taiwan's east coast to Taidong. We planned to get to Taidong in the early afternoon and spend a few hours biking to our destination, but there was a hold up. Apparently there was a little 4.4 earthquake directly under us that blocked the tunnel ahead just north of Hualien. We were stranded in a tiny coastal town for about 3 hours while they fixed it up. You can see the tunnel and a few bored families in the pic above. That's our bus on the right.
An old structure on the edge of town.
Back on the road, I shot this pic shot through the bus window near the Chingshui Cliffs. Below are the train tunnels, and above the car tunnel. Like most days this time a year in the north east of Taiwan, it was cool and drizzly.
We woke up the next morning in our mountain dormitory to blue skies, a hot sun, and an amazing view. We were now south of the Tropic of Cancer and ready to ride.
This is a posting to quell the critics of my past entry, in which not enough information was given...
And now for a components listing for my bicycle.
The thing about bicycles is that every top of the line bike part in the world is made in Taiwan. China is making more and more bicycles for the west, but all those bikes are going straight to Walmart.
Anyway, at the end of the year a few of these parts are still sitting in warehouses in Taiwan, and if you meet the right bike guy (see ALian above and below), he can throw together a custom bike for you for a low low price. As an added benefit, you can watch him build your bike from scratch.
For example the frame... this is a superlight all aluminum frame from Voodoo called Bokor. The cheapest you can find it on the internet is about 370 American plus shipping, while I paid about 180 for it... 
I saw these guys playing in Taipei on "Foreign Workers Day", some government sponered event where South East Asian workers got together for music and food and games.
It's kind of like hacky sack, only for really light, athletic, and flexible people.
The highway is cut into the 800 meter mountains that drop straight into the Pacific. Check out the two pictures above for a view from the highway looking down into DongAo, and a view from NanAo looking back at the highway. You can see the road there cut into the mountain about two thirds of the way up. (Please note that those two pictures were taken on a hot clear fall day in September, and last weekend was cold, windy, and grey)
You can see from this pic that the springs were "over developed". This is to say that some well meaning Taiwanese folks decided that they could improve these springs by building concrete pools, or pits, as I would call them. Though located in a beautiful unpopulated valley, you could only see the sky while sitting in the pits.
The springs were in this little valley, which was covered in these monsterous metamorphic boulders. Very uncharacteristic the valleys here.
Finally, here is a... flower. I would say it is a type of orchid, but I really have no idea.
