Emerged from our room over the market to search for some breakfast, and ended up getting swallowed up in the teeming mass outside our door. Saturday. Everybody in town was at the market doing their weekly shop, and all of them were using drive-thru.
Walked down a couple of streets where we were expelled out the end of the melee into the side streets like a cork coming out of a wine bottle. Took us a while to find anything that sold coffee – not high on the list of local shoppers buying their bag of bok-choy, but eventually we stumbled on a coffee shop where the server was as surprised to see a customer as we were to find him.
Sated, we headed back into the scrum and finally found our room behind a mass of scooters, and went through the motions of packing up.
Wandered down to the bus terminal and were ushered onto a random bus that had pulled up. At least the attendant knew what he was doing even if we didn’t. Sometime later we ended up back at the Taichung train station, and had a long wait for our train back to the capital, so we grabbed some lunch in the food court.
Being Saturday arvo, the train was a bit of a scrum. Even though it was a reserved seats carriage that we were in, lots of people without reserved seats were hoping that there would be some vacant ones, without any luck I might add, so the aisle of our carriage was taken up with people trying to grab a seat as soon as somebody stirred. Most of the time they were immediately kicked out again as the person who next had the seat reserved got on.
Took a few minutes to find the local bus stop at Taoyuan for the service out to the airport from the train station, and when we did find it we had a bit of a wait. However, it eventually came and conveyed us out to where we needed to be. Most of the food outlets in the terminal were shut, though there were a lot of flights still to happen, so we got some pasta heated at the 7-Eleven, and sat and waited.
There are three flights going at the same time from adjacent gates, one to Brisbane, one to Melbourne and the third to Sydney, so there’s a combined check-in counter. Luckily they opened it early for the assorted yobbos to go through. We were fairly close to the front of the queue so we got through quickly and had no hold ups at security or immigration.
Made use of the priority lounge while we waited for our flight. iI was bedlam inside. Almost standing room only for a while.
Took off on time. An Airbus A350 which seemed full.
Outside our door
Breakfast