Taiwan, the sunrise worth the journey

To miss the sunrise would be a great discourtesy: it is the main attraction of Alishan, a renowned mountain resort some seventy twisty kilometres from Chiayi, at the foot of the almost four-thousand-metre Mount Yushan (it's all green, which reminds us that we are in the tropics). The problem, of course, is that the sun rises at 5:40am and I spent the night trying to hook up the hotel's Wi-Fi to talk to the rest of the world.

Until last April, to climb to the top of Chusan, at about 2500 metres (from where you can see 'one of the three best sunrises in the world') you used the very steep railway, built by the Japanese to transport timber. Now, after a tree felled by a typhoon caused a fatal accident, the line is closed. Which, of course, discourages the laziest Chinese tourists: it takes an hour and a half to walk to the top, and cars do not circulate in the park (we, fortunately, have a permit).

So we leave the superb Alishan House - where over the years all the most important notables of Formosa, from Chiang Kai-shek on down, have been woken up at 4am by a zealous maid - and pass through a dense forest of cypress trees, some of them centuries old. The oldest are two thousand years old and tens of metres tall, many have grown on top of each other's cut stump, creating baroque architectures of shared, twisted roots.

Between the scant hour of sleep, the crisp air and the sunlight filtering through the trunks in the morning mist (which is very Japanese watercolour), one forgets about the humid smog of Taipei City and thinks one has arrived in another world, wondrous and fairytale-like.

Invigorated by the sunrise, we arrive at the Tsou tribe's cultural park, dedicated to the island's aborigines. The aborigines, over the centuries 'integrated' into the vast majority of the population of Chinese origin, have partly rediscovered their tribal roots, and in this village (which actually looks more like a holiday village) they grow excellent Oolong tea for tourists.

The business card of the guy accompanying us says "Yuyupas International Corp." Rather odd for a native tribe. The guy, however, is a professional sound engineer, who has worked for years in the States. What is he doing in this Garden of Eden? He acts as a guide in English with a nice Yankee accent, and looks after the sound for the tribal music and dance show that is the Yuyupa village's most popular attraction.

We recommend it without a doubt: the fact that the super-powered aboriginal people, dressed like the Indian guy from the Village People, choreograph a mix of tribal dance and break dance to 90s ethno-disco (including Enigma's chilling 'Return to Innocence', which actually uses a sample of Taiwanese aboriginal songs) makes for an alienating... and vaguely lascivious experience. Which would explain why huge tribal phalluses crop up here and there among the huts: they have a function, actually, but we won't tell you. A photo before leaving, however, is a must.