During my one-week trip to Taiwan for the 2016 Taiwan Lantern Festival, most parts of the trip went smoothly and I had a great time exploring Taoyuan, Yilan and Taipei.
The tour guide and bus driver were both excellent chaps, knowledgable, friendly and always ready to help.
The only hiccup occurred on the last night of the trip. It was raining for the whole day and we were up the mountains of Yangmingshan National Park to visit the hippie enclave, Yannick Dream Village, a group of old American army barracks which have now been converted into cafes and shops.
The area was fairly remote and there were limited parking spaces. Our driver went off to park in a more secluded area after dropping us off. Little did he expect this decision to park elsewhere to lead to the adventure which followed.
In choosing a grassy patch, our driver reversed the two back wheels of the bus into a large puddle of soft mud. As a result, he was unable to manoeuvre his bus out of the mud later on due to the lack of frictional grip on the back tyres.
Our driver tried a variety of measures to get the bus moving, but to no avail. All of us pitched in to attempt to push the bus out to give it a false start, but that didn’t work either. Eventually, we were saved by a giant rubbish truck which offered to pull and jack our bus out from the mud.
The rope snapped three times before the bus was finally freed. Kudos to the helpful sanitation workers and driver of the rubbish truck for helping us out!
The whole experience was quite an adventure as we were cold, hungry and exhausted.
The temperature was dropping steadily that day to less than 10 degrees celsius, down from over 16 degree celsius. It was wet and foggy. Dinner time was approaching and we are stuck in the middle of nowhere, with our tour guide having difficulty trying to get cabs for all of us to get out of the area.
That is where I am glad my WiFi router from Changi Recommends still works! I am able to use GPS to find out my location, send text messages to my friends and chat about the situation, while at the same time, seek alternatives to the next course of actions in the case we really cannot get the bus going!
Shit happens during travel, so make sure you have WiFi at all time! It certainly helps to calm my nerves when I am able to communicate with the rest of the world still, in spite of the dire situation we were in then.
Btw, Changi Recommends is running a promotional rate on their WiFI router rental and rental for Taiwan is going for as low as just S$5 a day! Considering that the router can be shared among a few individuals, it really is quite a steal! Don’t leave Singapore without it!
More information is available on the official website.
It is also only with the WiFi router that I was able to provide on-the-go Instagram and social media shares of my adventure in Taiwan:
A photo posted by Alvinology.com (@alvinology) on
A photo posted by Alvinology.com (@alvinology) on
All pictures shared using WiFi from Changi Recommends’ WiFi router.
