Biking in Taiwan

I ran into a story this morning about a guy bringing his expensive bike to a love hotel in Tianmu for a fling, the Feeling Hotel no less, not far from where we used to lived ten years ago. Read it.

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Day Yeong-tyi, director of the Sustainable Built Environment Research Center at Chung Yuan Christian University had an interesting article about Taiwan's current bicycle craze and the construction of bicycle paths in China Times on Tuesday. The headline translates into something like "Make bicycles a part of daily life and local communities" (讓自行車回歸生活 回到社區) and it can be found here.

Day pinpoints several problems and says the main construction concern seems to be the total length of bike paths, how they should be connected to each other, and how conflicts with other types of vehicles should be resolved and so on, while overlooking ecological, local and even cultural problems, as in the case of the Aboriginal Saowac community on the Dahan River which was demolished some time back.

For example, bike paths paved with concrete sever the connection between coastal and riverside ecological systems and inland ecological systems by cutting off the paths for animals living within both types of systems. He also says many alien plants are introdcued for landscaping purposes.

His suggestion is that in addition to looking at the total length of bike paths for commuting to work or school, local governments should look at boroughs, villages and communities as parts of one living space that can be traversed by bicycle, integrating all bicycle paths into one complete system that makes it possible to safely reach all services by bicycle. He ends by saying that it's not a good idea to only build riverside bike paths that radiate from cities into the surrounding countryside.

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A group of students from National Taiwan Normal University have done a 20-day bicylce tour taking them from Jinmen to Penghu and then via Luermen up to Danshui. What's special about the ride is that they were following the travel journal written by a Qing dynasty official who did the trip in 1697 to map Taiwan's sulphur mines, one of the oldest journals about traveling in Taiwan. Here's the article in the Taipei Times, Bikers follow 1697 travel diary to explore Taiwan, here's a Chinese map of the trip the Qing official did, and here's an article about an English translation of the book, also in the Taipei Times, once again proving that it's the best English language daily in Taiwan. I have both the Chinese book and the translation but haven't managed to read either.

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We really did get on our bikes this Monday, for a ride down to Jiaoxi, a dip in the hot springs, and a couple of really fresh seafood meals. We left at 7am and rode through early morning Taipei down to Muzha and then on to the 106 toward Pingxi. We arrived in Jingtong (菁桐) too early to get a cup of coffee there but I still had to make a short turn in to the old Japanese era train station building because I think it's so cool. And there are more and more of the pieces of bamboo with wishes written on them next to the station house every time we go there.

After Pingxi (平溪) we took the 2C (2丙) down to Shuangxi (雙溪) before we took the Shuangtai Access/Industry Road (雙泰產業道路) down to Daxi (大溪) on the coast. It started raining halfway to Shuangxi, but only a drizzle that kept going until we got almost to Daxi. But that was cool, because it meant that the sun was covered by clouds for the rest of the day and we got to do the ride in something like 25 degrees instead of 37.2 (which really was the high in Taipei last week).

There are a lot of climbs along this road. First we reached just below 300m before the road dropped to about 50m and then climbed up to around 500m. It then went up and down between 375 and a high of 517m before finally rolling down to Daxi on the Pacific coast, where we had some good fresh seafood. All in all we climbed 1293m Monday, and when we reached the hotel, we had done exactly 100.0km according to the Garmin, not a meter more and not a meter less. We promptly bought a lottery ticket that won us NT$400.

The hotel we stayed at turned out to be a bit worn down and it had Taiwanese- style beds - no mattresses, just a hard board. However, it did have three outdoor hot spring pools, which was what made us choose it in the first place. And we had them all to ourselves, just the two of us. I've always loved the feeling of sitting in a hot spring pool staring up at the skies, it just feels great. Anyway, we were both pretty tired, so we ended the night with a beer and some more seafood.

We slept a bit too late the next day and didn't get out on the road until 9am, which really was too late. No rain and no clouds meant that it was really, really, really hot around noon and the early afternoon. But that's OK. We'd rather drink some more water and stop a bit more often in the shade somewhere simply because we're too lazy to get up at 4.30am to be on the road at 5am, which probably is what you really should do to beat the midday heat.

The way back from Jiaoxi was more familiar, and the "9 turns and 18 twists" (九彎十八拐) isn't as tiring as people think. It does climb and ends at 537m after climbing from about 25m over abput 12km, but it never feels that steep. The climbs on the Shuangtai access road were more tiring. In Jiaoxi we had some coffee at Vanilla Sky because you are supposed to when you're there. Again, we were all alone, apart from Matthew Lien who had ridden there on his BMW 1100, so D decided to lie down for a nap on the floor.

On the road again, we fought the heat and made it up to Xiao Getou (小格頭) in Shiding (石碇鄉), and then decided to return to Taipei by rolling down the 9 to Xindian because we had never done that before. We always take the 47 or 47 B down to Shenkeng (深坑) instead, because either of the roads are great. But since it is now possible to go along the Xindian River all the way up to Gongguan and a plate of our favorite shaved ice with strawberries, mango and milk, we did that.

So, the Garmin GPS bike computer. It was everything I hoped for. It is great to be able to see altitude and slope gradient as you go, and on a couple of occasions it helped us take a right turn after a quick look on where we were headed on the map. I also liked seeing heart rate and cadense, and will probably start looking more at that than speed when I go biking in future. And uploading the data to the accompanying software and look at the ride afterward was something I really liked doing. The only thing I don't like is that the 705 does not export files in the gpx format, but since you can click a button in the program to see your ride in Google maps, you can then export it in kml format from there if you want to upload it somewhere else. I found that if you upload it to bikemap.net, it is then possible to export it in gpx-format from there.

Technorati tags: Taiwan, Taipei, biking in Taipei, biking, Jiaoxi, cycling

Swedish blogs about: Taiwan, Taipei och biking

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Bought myself a Garmin Edge 705 GPS bike computer last week. A fantastic little gadget that basically does everything but measure power output and prepare a coffee at the top of the mountain. Come to think of it, it is ready to measure and integrate power output into the other data if I were to buy a third-party unit that does the actual measuring.

Here is what it does do: cadence, heart rate, speed, distance, altitude, slope gradient, accumulated climb, sunrise, sunset, distance and time between any two locations of your choice along the route or time for every nth kilometer, ETA, distance to goal, remaining time to goal, time elapsed, either continuous or not measured when you stop or drop below a certain speed set by you, time spent resting. It of course also records the route so you can save it and upload it to the web (google maps, bikemap, etc.) and to the supplied software for analysis. You can also create new routes in the software and upload to the Edge which will then tell you were to turn so you don't go the wrong way in unfamiliar conditions. Wow. I think there are still more functions that I can't remember.

Living in Taiwan, I bought the local Chinese version (Chinese-only system, no other language options) which came with a MapSource city navigator map and a topographical map of Taiwan. Other maps can be added if we go traveling and want to use it to find our way around cities or countryside in another country without having to worry about finding printed maps there. Price? Almost as much as my bike: NT$13,000.

All this sounds great in theory, so if things actually work out as we plan them (they never do), we're taking it for a spin tomorrow and Tuesday for a two-day mini trip down to Toucheng and Jiaoxi and then back via Pinglin to see if it is as beautiful in practice as it seems to be in theory.

Technorati tags: Taiwan, Taipei, biking in Taipei, biking, biking tours, cycling, bike computers

Swedish blogs about: Taiwan, Taipei, bike computers and biking

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And they enter the atmosphere and swoop down on both wheels and continue down to Xindian and on toward Xiaokeng (小坑) or whatever that little community along the Wulai River is called. Never seen a sign. A 40km ride in the blazing summer heat. We left at 7, and that is already a bit late. By 8.30-9 it was burning out there, and I mean that hot kind of heat that is really hot.

My annual bonus came down a week ago, and I decided to invest in a Garmin 705 Edge GPS bike computer. Tells you everything you want to know, and then some: speed, distance, cadense, heart rate, accumulated climb, altitude, slope gradient, data for a section of your choice based on distance or location, sunrise, sundown, and a host of other data that I have already forgotten. I thus know that the first slope on this route after the Bitan suspension bridge has a grade of 12%, and that the steep incline further down has a grade of 17%. 17%! That's tiring.

I also know that I don't know how the frigging thing works. Came home after the ride and plugged it in to upload the data to the computer and look at all the data (I'm sure it's fun) and there was nothing there. How disappointing. I don't know which button I pressed wrong or what setting I screwed up.

Technorati tags: Taiwan, Taipei, biking in Taipei, biking, biking tours, cycling

Swedish blogs about: Taiwan, Taipei och biking

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