Destination: Taiwan

I love snap decisions.  Thanks to making one of them on Tuesday of this week, I'm flying out to Taiwan for my next bike tour in a little over five weeks.  It doesn't even seem as though I returned from Europe all that long ago, but I've decided to take advantage of another opportunity (even if it does mean working a bit of overtime in the next few weeks).  It probably seems crazy to some that I'm leaving summer behind and heading straight into "winter", but, well, this is the tropics (at both ends of the flight).  I'm still not sure if I'll be able to cross the 3,275 metre Wuling Pass in December/January, but I might just do it anyway.  

The main reasoning behind the decision was reading that some of the local mosquitoes in Taiwan carry Dengue fever.  A little research into that particular ailment provided some stories that I'd rather not confirm in person, and it seems "winter" is about the only effective mosquito repellent that I can ever recall coming across.  It just seemed the most logical thing to do was to bring the trip forward, and go December/January.  It took less than 24 hours to make all the arrangements (as an aside, that's one of the many benefits of living alone, the ability to make decisions like this and make the arrangements quickly).

It may be an overreaction, of course, but I can see other advantages -- cooler temperatures, escaping a Queensland summer for a few weeks, and biggest of all escaping usual bogan parade that goes with Christmas in Australia these days.  In fact, since there's no more Gold Coast United FC, and therefore no Boxing Day M1 derby (look it up on wikipedia if you don't know what I'm talking about), there's no real reason to stay here at all.  I fly out on December 22.