June 19, 2010

Looking for a day trip or a weekend trip out of Taipei? You could do a lot worse than head to Bitou Cape.

This beautiful and easily accessible cape (apparently shaped like a nose, hence the name – “Nose Tip” cape) is located on the northeast coast of Taiwan about 50 kilometers from downtown Taipei – if you follow the main routes to Keelung and then down the coast.

A much more interesting and scenic route (my preferred route by scooter) is Highway 106, which takes you through Pingshi and Shifen, and then on to Rueifang. At Rueifang, I like to head up the mountain to Jioufen and then down the other side to the coast through Jinguashi past the Golden Waterfall and the 13-Level Mine. This route adds another 20 kilometers to the trip.

I don’t know how long it would take to get to Bitou Cape by public transportation or by car, but this 70-kilometer trip by scooter can take two and a half hours. That seems like a long time for 70 kilometers, but I don’t even notice the time go by. I’m enjoying the winding road, the steep climbs, and the beautiful scenery too much.

Once you reach the coast, you simply turn right and head south (careful of those gravel trucks). I don’t believe there is an English sign for the small fishing harbor of Bitou. However, it is easy to recognize if you are keeping an eye on your mileage. Right at Bitou, the coastal road turns sharply inland alongside a picturesque fishing village. Local fishing boats fill the small harbor, and a bunch of funky Taiwanese buildings line both sides of the road and both sides of the harbor. This cluster of buildings around the small harbor is Bitou.

Just past Bitou, the road enters a tunnel and pops out on the other side at Longdongwan. If you’ve gone into the tunnel, you’ve overshot Bitou and Bitou Cape. Don’t worry. You can just continue to the other side, turn around, and come back through. In fact, coming from that direction makes things a little bit easier. This coastal highway can be extremely busy on the weekend, and it presents anyone trying to turn into Bitou or out of Bitou with a solid flow of traffic. Coming up from the south, it’s easier to simply turn right into Bitou. In any event, it’s a very small place, and it’s easy to walk to either end of the Bitou Cape trail. So the best strategy is to simply park your scooter or car wherever you can and then get around on foot. If you end up parking on the west side of the coastal road (which is away from the cape), it’s cool, because there is a convenient pedestrian overpass right before the tunnel.

The little village of Bitou had actually caught my eye many times before. I’ve driven through it on a number of occasions on my scooter and long ago on my bicycle. Each time, I reflected that it looked like a great place to hang out in and even spend the night (if there were a quaint little hotel… which, unfortunately, there isn’t). I had no idea that just beyond the village on the ocean side (obviously) there was a beautiful cape with a rocky shore, high cliffs, and easy trails affording great views of the region.

You can be forgiven for missing the cape. Like Yehliu Geopark and many other incredible features of the Taiwanese coastline, it’s kind of hidden and tucked away. Without knowing in advance it is there, you can drive past it a hundred times without seeing it. Even after I became aware of it (I stumbled across a reference to it on the Internet), I had trouble forming a mental picture of the cape. Tourism websites mentioned trails on the cape, and when I read the word trail, I pictured something rugged and difficult and long. A better word for the trails on Cape Bitou might be paths. And they are easy paths, fully groomed and manicured with convenient full maps at every intersection and large signs giving information about the local plantlife. Much of the paths actually consist of wooden walkways built along the cliff edge and wooden steps on top of heavy steel beams as foundations. The more of these developed coastal trails I see, the more amazed I am at the money and effort that went into building them.

The websites also talk about three different trails on the cape, but in reality the three trails are all just part of the one main trail. This trail starts at one end of the cape near the tunnel and goes around the cape and then pops out behind the village of Bitou itself back at the harbor, with a branch trail heading to the lighthouse and observation point. Technically, I suppose, both ends of the trail can be an entrance or an exit. However, it is much easier and more interesting to start the trail at the tunnel end and finish your walk at the Bitou village end. I say this because the beginning of the trail in Bitou itself is harder to find, and the trail starts with a steep climb of hundreds of wooden steps to the top. The tunnel end of the trail is easier to find and is much easier on the legs (and won’t leave you drenched in sweat and gasping for breath).

Websites also told me that the tunnel end of the trail can be found beyond the parking lot past the bus stop. And that turned out to be perfectly true. There is a bus stop right on the east side of the coastal road just outside of Bitou before the tunnel. This is where the pedestrian overpass is also located, so it’s easy to spot. A small paved road goes up the hill to the left just past the bus stop and leads to a small parking lot. This is the place where you want to begin your walk around the cape. (You can walk around the cape in an hour, but with all my stops and explorations, I was there for three hours and a bit.)

Just past the parking lot, there is a lovely and convenient coffee shop. You can sit down here and get a hot or cold drink, or buy a bottle of water for the hike. If you don’t have water with you, I’d pick some up here. The trails are easy, but this is still Taiwan, and the heat is going to have you sweating and thirsty before long.

A hundred meters past the coffee shop, the trail seems to dead end at a big school. This is the Bitou Elementary School, and why it is sitting there out in the middle of nowhere is more than I can explain. You couldn’t ask for a more scenic location, it’s true, but it seems an odd place to plunk down an elementary school.

When I reached the school gates, I thought I had completely missed the cape and was in the wrong place entirely. However, you just turn left at the school gates and continue walking along the trail. The trail follows the wall of the school, and you can look down on the school track, playgrounds, and basketball courts. At the end of the school, the trail goes down and you are truly on the cape.

Before long, you’ll reach a point where you can walk down some steps to the rocky shoreline. You might balk at the idea of walking down all those steps, knowing full well that you’ll only have to walk all the way up them again, but you should definitely go down there. It’s beautiful down there with crazy rock formations, fascinating tidal pools full of crabs and other creepy-crawlies, incredible views of the cape cliffs, and lots of local fishermen to talk to. It’s possible to walk along the rocks for a few hundred meters and then climb back up a second set of wooden steps. I’d recommend it, because you won’t really be missing much on the trail up above along that section.

Once you climb back up to the main trail, you can walk along the edge of the cape snapping pictures of the rocks below. Don’t miss all the great warning signs telling you to stay away from the cliff edge. Each one has a different stick figure falling head first through the air. They all had a rather exuberant air to them, not something you’d expect in someone falling three hundred feet onto solid rock. My favorite sign warned people to stay off the exposed rocky headlands below when the waves reach 6 meters (that’s eighteen feet) or face a fine of NT$3,000. I figure if you’re crazy enough to be down there fishing when the waves are eighteen feet high, a fine is going to be the least of your worries.

If you follow the trail all the way to the end, you’ll reach the lighthouse. You can’t actually go onto the grounds or into the lighthouse, but it’s worth a look. The original lighthouse was built in 1897. According to the sign, its foundations were unstable and it had to be rebuilt ten years later. Then it was flattened by Allied bombing during World War II. The present lighthouse was built in 1971. Many websites state that the lighthouse is 120 meters tall, and lots of people simply repeat that figure on their blogs or in photo captions. The lighthouse is clearly not 120 meters tall. I’d put it at 8 meters at best. I imagine it is 120 meters from the top of the lighthouse all the way down to the ocean at the base of the cape cliffs.

Just before you get to the lighthouse, there is a little piece of trail that goes off to the west to an observation platform (you can see what I mean on the map). The best views from the cape are from that observation platform, so it’s worth your while to walk that extra couple hundred meters.

Most of the end of the cape near the lighthouse is taken up by what looks like an abandoned military camp. There is still razor wire along the top of the fence and old security cameras and pillboxes, but the buildings are falling apart, and I didn’t see any soldiers anywhere. Looking at that military camp made me think about all the Taiwanese who have told me about their military service. I imagine at some point, some of them were doing their military service out here in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do but watch the lighthouse light go around and around.

From this point, you can backtrack down the trail and return to Bitou Elementary School, but there is no real point to that. The better option is to follow the other branch of the trail that goes past the military camp and makes its way to another nice observation point and then down a long series of wooden steps to the back of Bitou village. At one point, I saw what looked like a cemetery or a temple at the top of a small trail heading up a valley. It looks like it would be an interesting short walk, but I was drenched with sweat and tired from all my climbing around the rocks, so I gave it a miss.

When I got to the end of the trail in Bitou village, I was glad that I had started from the tunnel end. Despite the trail seeming to deadend at the elementary school, it was easy to find. The trailhead in Bitou village is not that easy to find. It’s tucked away at the very end of a nondescript lane, and I didn’t see any signs down on the harbor pointing the way. Of course, any local person could point you in the right direction, assuming you can communicate to them what you are looking for.

Bitou village is also a good place to end your hike because you can get a cold drink from any number of the little shops there. I bought and drank two liters of water before I’d even sat down. I also bought a little yellow “hiking towel” to towel off all the sweat. This is something I should have brought with me from the beginning. I’d had to resort to wiping my face on my shirt sleeves, and that is never very satisfactory. The elderly man who ran the store and sold me the towel then walked me over to an outdoor tap where I was happy to dump a ton of water over my head and arms. The trails were, as I said, more like paths, but they still kicked my butt and my three hours of exploring had left me exhausted, wet, and overheated.

A perfect end to this little stroll would have been popping into my quaint harborside bed and breakfast or small hotel for a shower, but, like almost all of these great little towns and villages in Taiwan, it had no such bed and breakfasts or hotels. I imagine this will change over time as tourism grows in Taiwan, but for now, finding a place to stay remains one of the bigger challenges on these little weekend excursions for me. On this weekend, I was lucky to have found an odd sort of hotel at Longdong – the small town on the next bay over – and that was where I went to take a shower and then collapse on my bed.

I was well-pleased with my little experience on Bitou Cape. It’s a beautiful place, easy to get to, and not far from Taipei at all. If there were a nice NT$1,000/night hotel there, or better yet, a NT$500/night hostel, it would be perfect.

[slickr-flickr tag=”Bitou Cape for Blog” type=”galleria” sort=”date” direction=”ascending” items=”50″]

 

Tags: Bitou Cape, Bitou Elementary School, lighthouse, scooter, Taiwan