Day 10 – Riding along the 193

2023-10-23

Start: 10:45 / Arrival: 19:00
Distance: 80km / Gained height 720 hm

Had breakfast around the corner at a local traditional breakfast restaurant with again super kind owners. The turnip cake and the buns plus the soy milk were again amazing.

Then left the hotel to ride on a beautiful dedicated cyclepath. This transferred to the completely silent 193 route, going inland. I guess we came across a single digit amount of cars for 75km.

Not only because of this I would consider the eastern valley 193 route an absolute highlight. The flora is so diverse, viewson gigantic dried river beds, pomelo trees, papaya and banana plants everywhere…so beautiful.

I expected some “trouble” with dogs, but even these where so calm, just laying on the street – not caring for us.

After riding through endless rice fields, inspecting the crop, we strengthened up at a convenience store and went for a small detour into the amazing “Danongdafu Forest Park”. This is a dedicated bicycle path through nature, involving a lot of those plants, Totoro uses as a umbrella. But hey, these were gigantic!

Meanwhile the rain, that had started halfway, got quite strong, so took only a short break at the ant park and infrastructure of the wood.

Transfer to Ruisui was then easy, with the height going down. Took a shortcut on a bigger road to get faster to town…completely wet from the rain started to look for our our booked onsen hotel and found out, that its in fact further out of town than shown in booking.com…ok, changed to a local homestay, cycled to it, said hello to a kind family from Hongkong – and contacted the owner of the stay which soon came.

Then a warm shower was warming us up again, went to some nice Taiwanese restaurant, had yummy mussels, oyster soup, boiled squid and some sort of water spinach for only 750 NTD.

Finally chilled out at our balcony to write the blog.