This weekend has been just about perfect; one of those periods of time when it’s great to be alive and just vacuum up every single thing life has to offer. We’ve had blissful autumn weather with clear skies, sun and moderate temperatures. We’ve discovered new things, broken out of our comfort zones and reaped some rewards. We’ve enjoyed some wonderful meals, entertaining movies, classic surf and best of all…we’ve still got two days left!
The weekend didn’t start too well. I was recovering from a three day long headache, one I get at varying intervals, but also one I haven’t had for many months, so it surprised me a little. Sharp, jackhammering spikes of pain just blast away behind my eyeballs and temple till it becomes quite debilitating. I had Thursday off and was still pretty much a passenger on Friday. Still, Friday evening came, the pall of another week at work seemed a long way off and some wood fired pizza and Aussie Rawson’s Retreat as my self-medicated vasodilator at Pizza Rialto was just the ticket. We made our plans to investigate the opening of a new road to the tip of the north coast the following morning.
Cass played Mum and made some sangas and we packed everything in the car (including surfboard of course) for the big trek. We found the on ramp to Expressway 1 at Neihu a 20 minute drive south east of where we are. It’s like launching onto the autoroute in France; have a deep breath then just accelerate straight into it! We took the off ramp with help of a rare English sign (usually, I’m summoning all my powers of memory to read the characters, usually only partly successfully!) then had to make some snap decisions to get onto another on ramp to another elevated road. There were no signs, but we just decided to follow the traffic and that seemed to work as we were spat out on the coast on the far side of the much feared inner city streets of Keelung, where we’ve been trapped in traffic before.
To cut a long story short, we enjoyed some north coast scenery on a glorious day, found Fulong beach to be blown out and continued to the famous Dashi, or “Honeymoon Bay” on the east coast. Miraculously the wind had swung offshore and a light dusting on small waves was a pretty scene at trendy Dashi. Some entrepreneurial types had set up to photograph the local surfers (for a fee) and seemed to be doing quite a trade. The real find was down at Toucheng off the harbour wall. Ross and I had got great surf there last year, but Cass and I found a cool little scene in the streets behind the main beach: board hire, trendy little coffee shops and bars and cool people almost all of whom seemed to speak great English. The surf was just epic: 5’ peeling offshore right handers. My buddies out on the point, Robert and Tony, had driven from Taipei and said that it was not good yesterday: great, I thought, I’ve finally cracked some spot at the right time. I asked Tony how he got there and he steered us even further south to another brand new expressway. We ate our lunch at the fish co-op up the road and steeled ourselves to find the new road: not such an easy task when most of the signs are in Chinese! Once again, “follow the traffic” worked well, we got spat onto the big road, paid our $40NT toll (A$1.80) then zoomed straight into a 13 KM TUNNEL! Yes, unbelievable as it may seem, that’s what happened. It was a brand new polished tube of concrete, two lanes each way. When we emerged, it was momentary before entering a 3 km one, then out onto km after km of elevated roadway scything through the mountain county. A few more daring maneuvers saw us transfer to another two expressways before dropping back down into Neihu and home. Phew…we felt like we’d been round the world and back!
I got up early and met Josh and Dan at Jinshan this morning. The surf was OK, but we decided to chase the surf and as is often the case, wasted half an hour checking all the spots before coming right back. Jinshan was pretty good: solid left hand point waves spoiled by an onshore, but not really doing it for me after yesterday. We all got a few good ones then headed back to Tienmu. Cass and I decided to go to the pictures and bought some tickets online to see “The Departed”. I enjoy most movies we see, but this was a cracker. Scorsese at his directorial best, a cavalcade of A grade actors effortlessly plying their art, and lots of violence, intrigue, sub plots and twists: brilliant!! We tried to go to a new French patisserie/café for lunch, but due to the “ten ten” holiday, it was booked for a private function. Second choice was “Aubergine”, our favorite Japanese/Chinese/Western fusion restaurant…delicious, but we had to wolf it down in order not to miss the movie. This post is soooo long! Sorry, enough, we still have two days to go! Photos: Cass with Fulong temple in the back..it’s right on the surf beach!, photographers, east coast, great right handers at Toucheng and the tunnel!