Day 2

Picking up the Tesla rental

Today I woke up around 2pm with many missed calls both from the hotel reception, and the car rental company, as I was supposed to pick up a Tesla rental and check out of my hotel that morning. As soon as I realized the time, I raced to pack up my things and quickly get ready to leave so I could try find another way to pick up the car. I checked out of my hotel and went and sat in a café while I waited for correspondence from the rental company. Eventually they came through and advised me to pick up the car from a hotel close by. I then went there to pick up my rental car for the week.

After inspecting the car, I was off racing around the city streets of Taipei. At one point after not having the car that long I parked in the carpark under Taipei 101, and when I came back to get the car I could not find it as many of the signs were in Chinese. So I was walking around the car park for around 20 minutes trying to open every white model 3 I could find (as I also had not memorized the number plate yet). Eventually I figured out I could beep the horn from the Tesla app, so I was able to use that to find the car. When I was leaving the car park I forgot to pay before going up around 4 levels of one-way ramps, so I had to press the intercom button for assistance. They couldn’t speak English but must have seen I was having difficulty, so they just let me out for free.

Now, I planned to start to make my way down the east coast of Taiwan, so I would be driving to Jiufen that day… not that I had any idea what I would do there or where I was going to stay. The drive to Jiufen was quite interesting. I was driving through mountains and tunnels admiring the landscape of city buildings meeting natural beauty scattered throughout the island. At one point, when I was close to Jiufen I parked that car to test out getting some drone shots of the surroundings. The drone allowed me to capture more of the experience I was having as it enabled me to zoom out and capture the scale of the environment in ways that are not possible from the ground.

I thought I was doing quite well with the driving considering I was driving in a foreign country on the opposite side of the road to what I was used to and not being able to read many of the signs. However, looking back at some of my go pro footage I found that subconsciously whenever I was driving on one lane roads (that have two-way traffic) I was passing cars on the left when I should have been doing so on the right… whoops. Luckily the traffic in these situations was quite slow so no one really reacted or was inconvenienced by my mistake.

Another problem I ran into was that some of the streets in the smaller towns were extremely narrow. I had one occurrence where I accidentally drove down a street that was extremely narrow (that was meant to support two way traffic). It was so narrow that it took me around 15 minutes to travel around 10 meters, realize I couldn’t make it any further and then use someone’s garage to make a 300-point turn to go back out the way I came. This was quite a nerve-racking experience in the Tesla as the entire time, the car’s sensors were going crazy. Thankfully there were a few locals who saw I was having difficulty and helped to guide me out.

Jiufen

I arrived at Jiufen around 5pm. I needed to stop to book a hotel for the night and find out what I should go see in Jiufen but I was a having too much fun blasting around the mountain roads of the area that I went up and down the main mountain past the old town twice before finally parking the car.

I booked a homestay for the night that entitled me to free parking (parking can be quite scarce in Taiwan, even outside major cities). When I arrived at the homestay, I realized very quickly that the hosts, who were very friendly and welcoming, could not speak English, and also my Chinese was not good enough for the communication I needed to have with them, so we were forced to communicate using Google translate. At one point when the host was asking me what I wanted for breakfast, I noted that the translator had translated part of the menu to ‘Black tea’ which I thought I knew how to say in Chinese, so I replied 我要喝黑茶 (wo yao he hei cha) meaning ‘I want to drink black tea’, she looked quite confused but seemed to understand. I was also confused as I didn’t recognise it on the menu. I figured out later that night when talking to a Chinese friend about the experience that they use the colour red (红, hong) to refer to black tea as red tea.

Once I finished checking into the hotel it was getting kind of late, so I walked to the Jioufen old street to get some food. It was a little late, so most things were closed, but I was able to get some interesting photos of the old street lit up with red lanterns. I had to settle for a 7-Eleven Szechuan noodles, which I enjoyed sitting on the balcony of my homestay room looking out at the view down the mountain towards the ocean.