When we woke up the next morning, I still couldn’t feel my right toe. Not joking. It was a weird feeling and we couldn’t understand why: was it still cold? No way! Had I lost sensitivity forever? Hope not. We didn’t think too much about it and started preparing ourselves for the last stage of our bike trip.
(For those curious about what happened with my toe, a month after coming back home I still couldn’t feel it, so I went to the doctor. After some tests to check that my nerves were not affected and telling her the complete story about the trip, the shoes, etc., she told me that most probably I had tightened the cycling shoes too much, thus blocking blood circulation to my fingers. She also told me not to worry about it, sooner or later I would recover sensitivity. Like a month or two later I started to feel my toe again. Hurray!).
It was quite a short stage, so were not in such a hurry as previous days. The clothes we had washed the night before were still pretty wet. While one of us was taking a shower, the other tried to dry the clothes with the hair dryer in the room (fortunately there was one!).
After breakfast and finish packing our stuff, we went to say goodbye to the hotel owner. He was super friendly with us. He was a bit disappointed because we had arrived so late the day before that we hadn’t had the chance to enjoy all the hotel facilities. Because of this, he told us he wouldn’t charge us the complete room fee, which was like 45 €, but 30 € instead. We wanted to pay the complete fee but he would insist. If we sometime have the chance to go to Renai again, we’ll for sure go back to his hotel. He was an exceptional host.
It was like 9:15 when we left the hotel. To get from the hotel to the road that takes you to the actual Renai, we passed through one of these red bridges and then a tiny but extremely steep endless (500 m?) road. It was a foggy and not so warm day, and it looked like it would start raining any moment. As Yu tends to say, it was 'mystical'.
Pic. 1: Mystical socks for a mystical day
Pic. 2: The clouds were lower than we were
5 km later we reached Renai. From there, we knew we had like 25 km downhill and then some 10 km uphill till Sun Moon Lake. When we started to go down, rain started to pour heavily. Despite the glasses, water started to get in our eyes and we could see nothing. Not only that, sun cream also started to get in our eyes. We had to stop; I could not stand it anymore. What to do?
Thinking and thinking, Yu remembered we had packed the cycling caps. Remember we said they saved our lives? We put the cycling caps on (below the helmet), dried our eyes, cleaned our glasses and retook the descent. The caps made such a difference. From not seeing anything and getting water into our eyes all the time to keeping our eyes dry and being able to ride comfortably.
Pic. 3: The descent took us to Puli, where we were back in the civilization
When we finally got to Sun Moon Lake, we felt the trip had been totally worth it, from the beginning till the end, including all the tough parts and of course the great moments, which had been clearly more numerous than the former.
The weather was perfect now, it was like if Sun Moon Lake were welcoming us. We took our rain jackets off, and also the caps and socks. We had initially planned to surround the complete take to complete our cycling trip, but after getting lost ending up in a couple of dead ends, we decided to only cover like half of the lake and look for the Giant rental bike shop to return the bikes.
Pic. 4: Just arrived to Sun Moon Lake. Complete happiness.
There are some showers next to the rental bike shop. I mean, that was perfect. They’ve thought about everything. To be honest, the rental bike experience was better than we had expected.
We took a shower and got changed, took our stuff from the bike bags to place it in our backpacks, returned the bikes and went for lunch. It all went really smooth.
It was a bit late and most lunch places were closed. We could have always bought something in 7-Eleven, but we thought we deserved better and kept looking for something. We finally found a place where we could seat for lunch. We had noodles, rice and vegetables. All very tasty and at a very good price for such a touristy place.
From there, we went to the bus station and bought a couple of tickets to Taichung. That was the end of our bike trip. One that we would always remember. Full of good experiences and physically challenging. One that we will never get bored talking about.
Pic. 5: This picture says it all. The best summary of our trip.