Photos by MJ Klein

Before I forget, my Nikon D-80 just came back from the shop on Thursday, and all seems very good.  I used it to take the shots for the Ghost Month piece over the weekend.

In our last installment, I left you with this photo:

We spent some time photographing this bridge before we took off to head back home.

The cable anchors were artistically decorated.

Viewed from the road, the artwork lined up perfectly.

Some people don't like open spaces in bridges.

I wish I didn't happen to know the sheer strength of a stainless steel 6mm bolt, either.  The gray box is a light that comes on at night to light up the brigde (see the previous article in this series).

This is the view straight down on the left side of the bridge.

And this is the view straight down on the right side.  Stop thinking about those small bolts.

After checking out the bridge we headed back down the mountain.  Around the 1,000 meter mark, we found this little "camping" place.  The sign said camping so we had to check it out.  As soon as I saw the karaoke machine, I understood.  We won't be camping here anytime soon.

We passed over the bridge shown in the first article and headed back on the windy route.

Along the way, it was raining very heavily.  We stopped at one of the larger Farmers' Markets.

There are several cooperatives that help local farmers market their goods to the public.  The quality of the goods is excellent and the prices are competetive.

This is a tea master who introduced us to some oolong tea from a small farm in Nantou.  No matter what you've read about spring tea this year, I can tell you that it's very good.  This year's crop leaves little to complain about (unless you want people to think you have tasting super powers).  We bought two bags of 2008 spring tea from this supplier and the tea is excellent.  I've sampled spring tea from several tea farms this year.

We walked into the next building and found one of the coolest things I've ever seen:

A highly detailed relief map of the area!

Around the perimiter are placenames and photos.  You press the button on the placename and the place lights up on the map.  Cool!

As you can see, the map is quite large.  And as you can also see, there wasn't a single person interested in it except us.

After playing with the map for awhile, we got back on the road.  We were met with rain for more than half of our return journey, which took approximately 4 hours.

Tags: Taiwan Dongpu Bridge Mountain Rain

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