aeeble

Today I took National Highway 6 to Nantou in search of a wild hot spring. After getting on Route 14B at Puli and passing Wushe, I turned toward Lushan. Soon roadside signs for Chunyang Hot Spring appeared; following the track down to the river valley I saw the riverbed ford where tourists had been trapped in the last heavy rain and the red steel bridge now under construction. Local residents told me the spring has been buried; only a thin trickle seeps from the cliff face nearby, and the pool an excavator had scooped beside it is none too clean. So I retraced my way, drove past the fork to Lushan Hot Spring, and continued uphill. A little beyond the sign for Xibao Tribe, just as I entered the Jingying Village settlement, a tiny marker on the right pointed down a cement lane barely wide enough for one car. After passing an aboriginal-style house I came to a red notice declaring this community a Type-A restricted area requiring a permit. The road ahead was poor; anything but a high-clearance vehicle would struggle. Half-way down I met a construction truck coming up, but we managed to back to a bend and squeeze past, then descended all the way to Lover’s Suspension Bridge. I parked at the fork beside the bridge on a small clearing that looked as if someone were trying to develop a scenic spot. Only later did I learn that on holidays someone used to collect parking fees here; on this weekday no one was about, though construction vehicles sometimes passed. In fact you needn’t park there—online reports show cars parked higher up the road. Leaving the car, we walked upstream, rounded the cliff beside the bridge, and found two stone-ringed pools: one noticeably hotter, the other fed by stream water for temperature control. The flow was strong and the setting beautiful; my friends slipped straight in while I settled for a foot-soak. Wondering why everyone says Jingying Hot Spring has vanished, I checked the web afterwards and learned that there used to be many more pools all along the creek; the largest may indeed have been buried. For us, these scenic wild pools were more than enough. I also found recent posts from visitors who soaked in pools six hundred metres farther upstream—next time I’ll go and see.