Seems that sometimes, you get really restless. So restless that you can’t quite sleep.
Last Saturday was one of those days. I took off around 8 PM for a night ride with touring kit and was aimless till I decided that I wanted to ride the west coast down for 50 kilometers. Then I’d find a place to sleep.
My 50 kilometer ride a bit over 2 hours later had me pulling into Baishajia Lighthouse-白沙岬燈塔 park in Guanyin Township of Taoyuan County. I found a wooden floored gazebo that looked solid and quite welcome to sleep on now that I was finally tired. Despite being in the open air, only a few mosquitoes and flying cockroaches bothered me through the night.
In the morning, I was back up and riding down the coast trying for a route I hadn’t tried before. Low and behold, the Taoyuan-桃園 coastal bike path was before me and on down it I went.
I’d really like to try and find the northern starting point of the Taoyuan coastal bike path. This route while winding and threading, is in pretty good condition overall. Seemed like parts of it had just been finished in the past year.
Come 6:30 AM I passed through Yongan Harbor-永安漁港. Surprisingly, there was easily another dozen riders already going through as well. They seemed to have come from the east than via the bike paths. The bike paths themselves didn’t start picking up traffic till well after 8 AM.
Hsinchu-新竹 has a 17 kilometer beach front ride that is quite flat and in decent shape, but the connection between the northern Taoyuan coastal path and it left a desire for better guidance. In the end, head for the Hsinchu waterfront once you come to the end of the Taoyuan bike path.
The bummer of 5 hours riding though of heading south was the prior nights 29 to 32 kph was kept to 15 to 17 kph due to the strong northerly winds. After fighting the winds for so long, I finally hopped onto a southbound train in Zhunan-竹南 to spend a couple of days with the inlaws.
While Taiwan’s west coast isn’t normally noted as a great bike ride, I was pretty happy with Sunday’s coastal adventure and wouldn’t mind giving a west coast Taipei to Kaohsiung 3-day ride a whirl. Any takers?
