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Mud Games for all ages

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Fenglin welcomes the Mud Games – A Fun Holiday in Scenic Hualien 找到田國際泥巴運動會 The Beilin Village Community Association ( 北林社區 ) of Fenglin Township ( 鳳林 ) is organizing its fifth annual Mud Games event, for fun and sports in its early summer rice fields.  The annual event has attracted a growing number of local and international visitors over the years, for a taste of rural Taiwan and the best opportunity for all-natural organic fun, in the middle of the fertile and scenic fields of eastern Taiwan.  In a creative twist, watermelon rugby has been the event’s main attraction, with the town’s most popular produce at the center for grabs.  Tug of war in the mud has also been popular among different age groups, and track competitions give the participant a feel for the traditional farmer’s daily tread across the rice fields.  Watermelon Rugby fun in the mud.  Photo photo by 曾瑞騰 from the official Mud Game facebook site  I organized a team last year and competed in the tug of
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Taroko Village Hotel 太魯閣山月村

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Today I will introduce a unique place to stay.  From the perspective of a resident in Hualien, a local hotel must be unique enough to attract even locals to want to pay to stay.  The Taroko Village hotel is one of those unique spots, situated in the Taroko National Park and surrounded by mystic mountains and a forever changing natural scenery of mountain cliffs, clouds and wild life. Located at Buluowan, which means “echo” in the indigenous Taroko language, the village hotel is made up of a dozen or so wooden huts, which blend harmoniously into the national park surroundings.   It is a small hotel, but with added beds in the larger rooms, it can house as many as a hundred people in total. The dining hall offers traditional Taroko food including millet wine that is popular among indigenous communities.   Often frequented by monkeys and other wild animals, it is also a favorite spot for nature lovers who either just want to relax on a villa porch or enjoy the hiking trails around the
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The Premier Tour Day 2 賴院長遊花蓮 第二天

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April 15, 2018. The day began with a press conference at the Promised Land Resort 理想大地渡假村 in Shoufeng Township 壽豐鄉 .  The particular building where the press event was set up was actually a former pig pen.  Converted into a relaxing space for coffee, tea and locally made cakes and tapas, it also offers smaller side rooms for special courses in coffee tasting offered to guests of the resort.  Few people know that Hualien grows coffee, and that coffee grown in Hualien was once the designated drink of the Japanese emperor during the colonial period.   Unfortunately most of the press questions during the conference here involved highly political issues unrelated to Hualien.  But the setting of a fish pond and greenery outside the broad window provided good scenery as a backdrop.  The Promised Land Resort is uniquely made up of canals and Spanish style low-rise buildings.   Though the canals are man-made, they blend easily into the natural scenery, utilizing clean ground water.   Guests
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The Premier Tour: Day 1 賴院長遊花蓮

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My job is not a tour guide, but to support the revival of the tourism industry in Hualien, I have been playing this role diligently recently, vigorously promoting and recruiting friends to visit and tour Hualien.   Following the presidential tour that was a gesture to assure the public of the safety and sustaining beauty of Hualien after the earthquake, my staff immediately started organizing the next official tourism inspection tour of Premier Lai 賴清德院長 . There are plenty of places to visit in Hualien, but the first challenge was to organize an itinerary that was different from that of President Tsai’s, introducing lesser-known sites and locations to the Premier and his press team.  His Hualien tourism promotion delegation spent two days, April 14-15, 2018 in Hualien.     The first stop was at the historic General’s Residence 將軍府 , situated right in the middle of Hualien City.   There is no record of any actual general ever living there, but the row of eight Japanese era woode
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The Presidential Tour Day 2

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The Presidential Tour    Day 2   MARCH 31, 2018 We all woke up refreshed from the hot spring bath ready for another day of President Tsai’s tour of Hualien.   Antong Hot Spring Hotel provided a simple buffet breakfast of rice porridge, steamed buns and soy milk.   But we were off to another breakfast meeting with the traveling press corps, at Jijeng Ranch 吉蒸牧場 . http://www.jjfarm.com.tw/    I got to know the ranch and its owner, Mr. Fan, several years ago when I was trying to encourage local farmers to increase the value of products by promoting the geographic identity of their products and encouraging a circular economy with locally grown feed.   Today the cows on Jijeng Ranch munch on grass and corn grown right here by other farmers in Hualien, decreasing dependency on imports and the carbon footprints of imported feed.   Here we borrowed their conference center for a chat with the press.   Dairy products from Jijeng Ranch Following the morning coffee and dairy
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The Presidential Tour

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If you want to travel like a Taiwanese President, take this Presidential Tour to Hualien!  On March 30-31 2018, Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen led a delegation of journalists to Hualien in an effort to support the culture and tourism of Hualien in the aftermath of the February 6 earthquake, which caused significant harm to the tourism industry.   My constituency service team organized the tour, hoping to introduce some new sites and activities to potential visitors through the lenses of the press corps traveling with President Tsai.   I have received many inquiries about sites she visited, so here is an introduction.   Day 1 Taiwanese people just cannot avoid shopping, especially for local delicacies and food souvenirs that represent a travel experience.   The mochi, a rice ball made of glutinous rice, usually wrapping red bean or sesame paste, is a common souvenir from Hualien.   At Amis Mochi you can watch the factory production process in a guided tour and shop a
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