photos – the otnaicus daily

Edition 225 – é‡ŽæŸ³, å°ç£

So here’s the promised post about é‡ŽæŸ³. As you can see from the panorama above, é‡ŽæŸ³ is a peninsula situated along the northern coast of Taiwan. It’s an area filled with beautiful rock formations due to sea, and possibly wind, erosion. Went there with a colleague on 24 November 2007.

We made the journey by bus to the place. The bus ride takes about 1.5 hours and that’s excluding the time required for us to take public transport to the bus terminal. All in all, a one-way journey took as about 2 hours. And thank God for the good weather while we were there.

This place is also famous for a rock formation that is known as the Queen’s Head. Why? See picture left. Doesn’t it look vaguely like a queen’s head? Unfortunately, you can only see this outline from a certain angle. From another angle, it looks like a bird’s head. It took quite a while for us to take a picture with the Queen’s head. Tonnes of people were trying to take a picture. A Caucasian even tried to take a photo of the rock from afar using a 200mm lens. He held the camera and lens up for like 5-10 minutes before he finally got a picture. After a while I got pretty frustrated, just snapped a couple and went off. Couldn’t be bothered to get a quality picture without anybody in the background.

One of my better-liked pictures on the right. Had to venture of a bit into a prohibited area to get this picture taken. It was just a perfect spot, what with a high vantage point and away from people obscuring the fore and background. The picture on the far right is a not-so-properly executed picture of me “lifting” the rock behind me. Oh well, it was a good try anyway. And of course, my favourite… Me sitting on the rock “meditating”. Just had to climb up upon that rock after seeing another guy do just that. The rock looks big but the surface area on which I was sitting is pretty small. Getting up there wasn’t a piece of cake either.

Here are just a small subset of the pictures I took. You can head over to my gallery to view more. I have some stitched panoramas there and I’ll be uploading some more pictures as soon as the gallery server allows me to upload more. So enjoy the pictures. Cheers…. :Ãž

Edition 224 – The Disappearing Act

Disappearing act? Whose? Actually, talking about mine. Haven’t had the inspiration or motivation to blog lately. But I thought I’d drop a line here to prevent the cobwebs from gathering.

This week has been unusually productive for me. Manage to get quite a chunk of things done and even spent time at home working on some stuff when there wasn’t a need to. I don’t know what has gotten into me this week but this kind of momentum is pretty nice. Only today I’ve slowed down a bit because it’s a Friday and the weekend begins like right now.

Went to this place called é‡ŽæŸ³ on the northern coast of Taiwan. It’s 1.5 hours outside of Taipei city by bus. This place has interesting rock formations formed by continuing sea and possibly wind erosion. The visit definitely took me back to those upper secondary school days when I was studying Geography. I have got good pictures of the place and the landscape so I will definitely put some up here and on my photo album online. Pray that I get the motivation to edit them this weekend.

Headed back to Singapore next Friday for a week. Sad that I have to spend Christmas and New Year here but I’ve decided not to work on Christmas. Yup, Christmas is not a public holiday here in Taiwan and I’m basically working through local and Singapore holidays. But I have decided to just not work on Christmas. It’s just not right to work on Jesus’ birthday. But of course, me not going on strike lah. At the end of the day, still got to inform my PM that I’m taking the day off.

Heading off to dinner and back home now. So until the next time, cheers… :Þ