Sunday, October 02, 2005

Lungwang: Day 1

Well, the typhoon is here....if you look at the satellite weather pics it looks as though Lungwang is blowing us all to Mongolia, but here in central Taiwan, protected by 3,000m mountain ramparts, this super-typhoon means intermittent rain and excellent picture-taking conditions.

So far we haven't gotten much in the way of wind and the rain has been gentle and enjoyable. Things are damp rather than soaking, and the dogs are dry. This is nothing compared to Talim so far here in central Taiwan, although I pity the people on the east and northeast coast, who will get slammed by Lungwang....


With Lungwang keeping the kids inside, my daughter brushes up on her calligraphy.

Typhoons mean clear skies -- northern Taichung from the street by my house.

Talim left this road litter with broken branches. So far, so good.

The river is low.

Businesses are open as usual in Tanzi, the small town near our house.

Clean air: mountains ordinarily invisible are a sumptuous purple-green.

No downed branches, and no cleaning crews.

It's great to be able to see the mountains for once, and understand why they called this island "Formosa" -- The Beautiful Island.

UPDATE: The Taipei Times reports.

3 comments:

Tim Maddog said...

Hey! Who put those mountains there? They weren't there yesterday! ;-)

Michael Turton said...

No shit...and the funny thing is, the Taiwanese don't seem to miss them. You know, normally you can't see them, and yet in 15 years here I've never heard anyone local comment how nice it would be to be able to see them. Only us foreigners do that.

Anonymous said...

We didn't get slammed that bad in Yilan. Windy enough to wreck my plans for the weekend, but hardly windy enough to be interesting or cause much damage. Damn it.