Ali Shan - Lumber

Being from the Pacific Northwest, there is something familiar about going to Ali Shan. Before there were the tourists it was a lumber town. After the Japanese took possession of Taiwan in 1895, they used Taiwan as a source for natural resources. The cypress trees growing on the Mountains around Ali Shan were cut down and sent back to Japan. The local Tsou tribal people thought of these big trees as their gods so there was friction. But eventually economics trumped religion and the trees were cut down until the 1970's.

There are lots of reminders of this past on Ali Shan, like stumps.

I remembering eating in a restaurant in a logging town in Washington State, the loggers next to me told me:
"The only good tree is a stump." But from the stumps nature fights back, this regrowth from a stump is called "the Four Sisters".

There is machinery left over from those logging days, like this steam powered collector. They basically use cables to drag logs to a collection point on the RR. They use similar collectors in the Pacific NW now, of course they are gasoline/diesel powered.

Gasoline is now about 33NT per liter, that works out to about $4.46 per gallon and that's with the Taiwanese government subsidizing the price. When this old gas pump gave out the last price was 10NT per liter. That's one safe fact of life, the price of gas is going up and will never go down.

Some of the stumps are quite remarkable, they remind me of the novel "Snow Falling on Cedar" which was made into a great movie.