After an overnight stop back in Zhubei to do some laundry and pack up for our next adventure, we headed for Taipei via HSR and then boarded a train for Hualien on the east coast.  The trip from Taipei to Hualien took a couple of hours and from there we needed to make our way down the coast for our night’s accommodation in Shitiping.  We were a group of 8 people and my host’s plan was to have all of us rent motor scooters and drive down the coast.  In short, he wanted to form a scooter gang.

Yeah.  Anyway…

Now, my host is a good guy but sometimes he doesn’t think things through.  Since most of us had never driven a motorcycle or motor scooter before (including him), we were to start from busy and traffic-filled downtown Hualien, traffic rules here are a suggestion instead of real rules, and it would be nighttime when we arrived at our destination, somehow this situation just seemed filled with win to me. -_-

Since I prefer 4-wheeled conveyances, I was the party-pooper and asked to rent a car instead, which fortunately aligned with my host’s cousin’s recommendation that we have a support vehicle so those who are tired can rest and take the motor scooters in turns.  Getting a car turned out to be a really good idea since there were others on the trip who preferred it and one of the scooters had a flat not 10 minutes from the city.

We didn’t have time to go back to the city and no means to move the scooter so we opted to call the rental company and leave the scooter at a local service station for them to pick up.  On the plus side, we had a nice view of the ocean while we were stopped.

The 2 people sharing that scooter were able to fit into the car (5 of us in total) so it all worked out. 🙂

One the way out of Hualien, we headed up a mountain to get a good view of the city on what happened to be a nice clear day.

We headed down the mountain to the coast highway and on our way down we saw something quite unexpected.

This is part of the Farglory Ocean Park theme park and we definitely didn’t expect to see a huge castle on this coastal adventure. 🙂

We finally got things back on track and from then on we had an uneventful trip down the coast, enjoying the lovely weather and views.

At dusk we reached out destination where we were spread across two B&Bs next door to each other.  Here is the one where the guys stayed.

Both hostels were made of concrete but they had a very modern design and were decorated comfortably.

This room had a huge private balcony overlooking the Pacific Ocean.  I’ll have more photos from that in my Day 10 post since it was a bit too dark by the time we got in.

The common room was quite spacious and also served as a gallery for local artists.

After cleaning up a bit, we headed out for dinner.  I have a lot of photos from that so I’ll save that for a different post.