Landscapes of Taiwan! -Central Taiwan- Part 1: Strange Trees

Ok, so the title is kind of wrong now, since I forgot that it's not all landscapes. Alright, keep reading.

Alishan is a popular Taiwanese destination for tourists and locals, located in Chiayi County. It's on the west side of the island, pretty much right in the middle of Taichung and Tainan.

The area's probably most well-known for the tea grown here. I think it's a combination of the high altitude (over 1000m) and humidity that makes the oolong tea grown here so desirable.

There's also some special wasabi grown in the area that I tried. It was freshly grated and came out whitish, really sweet, and less spicy than the ones we're used to eating with sushi.

Otherwise, people visit Alishan to hike through the forest/mountain trails and typically stay overnight in hopes of catching the "sea of clouds" that may or may not happen during sunrise between Alishan and Yushan. (By the way, "shan" is "mountain" in Mandarin, so it's really "Mount Ali" and "Mount Yu".)

It's a bigger deal than it sounds like, because it's actually a huge pain in the ass to get up there. I actually met a couple of photographers on the train, with some people in their group visiting for the 4th time because they never got a chance to shoot it. So to leave you all (yes, all 5 to 10 of you that read my posts) in suspense, this post will just cover the hiking.

This is the train I was talking about. Actually sure if that was the only one , or if there were more and they're all the same. Anyway, the tracks run through the forest up the mountain because the Japanese used to export the lumber from the Taiwania and Cypress.

Yup, they got big old trees here. Like I think a couple of them were around 1,000 years old.

There were also a lot of hollowed out stumps, that looked like abandoned huts:

The cool thing is, sometimes a tree will grow out of another's dead stump. And another will grow out of THAT one's dead stump. So you get generations of trees growing on each other. See, it says so on the signs.

My uncle told me that this was basically like a soul urn for the trees in that forest. That's all I know about it, but I thought it was interesting that anyone had even thought to make one.

This last one, isn't a tree. It's FIVE trees that grew together, and became...

a special type of tree, Morty, called a mega tree, and there's fruit in those trees, and there's seeds in those fruits. I'm talking about mega seeds. They're they're incredibly powerful, and I need them to help me with my research, Morty.

Hah, kidding. I just really love watching "Rick and Morty". I mean, that really is five trees that grew together and became one, but they're not called mega trees, and they don't have fruits with mega seeds.

Ok, that's it, upvote, resteem, follow, etc.