Sidequest to strawberries: Dahu Township

We have been surprisingly busy over the first two months of the New Year, and this is the first report back from our many missions around Taiwan. The early part of the year is a time full of events, most notably the Chinese New Year period. In amongst all of that, though, is a small side adventure we went on.

North of Taichung, in Miaoli county, is a strawberry farming hotspot that produces a bounty every year. The farms in the area grow strawberries that can get really big, and it’s a popular activity to go and pick your own. From what we’ve heard and read, the best time to go is considered to be February and March, and so we squeezed in a trip up that way before the chance slipped by.

Getting to Miaoli county is the easy part, with many trains heading up to Miaoli Station every day, we had our pick of local and express trains. From there, we needed a bus up to the rural Dahu township. The bus station is hard to miss, and with only a few bus routes from there it was much less difficult to get a bus than we’d anticipated. All it meant was waiting in the slightly windy bus terminal for ours to arrive, and then we were on our way up into the scenic mountains.

The township of Dahu is pretty small, with most of the activity happening at the Dahu Winelands Resort, marked out by an unmissably big strawberry statue. From there everything was strawberry themed. EVERYTHING. In the market and stores you can get strawberry and marshmellow skewers, strawberry pork sausages, strawberry wines, vodkas, and even whiskys. Even the trashcans are strawberry shaped.

Singing the Beatles, we made off to the strawberry fields that stretch (almost) forever outwards from the resort. The fields immediately surrounding the market were quite busy and already starting to look less fruitful, so we wandered around until we found a quieter farm. Each farm site has some baskets and scissors available, and we were directed to the fields to start collecting. Some fields are off limits, to prevent over-harvesting, but regardless of this we were able to harvest a lot of strawberries without getting in anyone’s way. You pay by weight at the end of your picking session, so it’s really up to you how heavily laden your basket should be by the end of the day.

After picking our berries and having them weighed, we wandered the market trying the various strawberry-related things on sale. The weather was windy and quite cold by Taiwan standards, so we gave the ice-cream a skip in favour of sampling the insides-warming strawberry whisky and wine.

One thing that I have to mention is the frustratingly inflexible Taiwanese market salesperson attitude to special offers. It doesn’t really seem to matter if you want or need to take the special offer. If there are three options, say strawberry wine, vodka, and whisky, and there is a specific combo special, you can stand on your head and yell that you don’t want the special offer, as that’s all you can get. Mainly, I think it is a language barrier problem. We talked in circles in the conversational equivalent of Sisyphus’s punishment.

Seller: “There is a special offer. You can take two of number 3 and one of number 2 for discount.”
Us: “But we only want one number 1, and one number 3.”
She thinks for a moment, considering our bizzare refusal of the generous deal.
Seller: “Ok, for you. There is a special offer. You can take two of number 3 and one of number 2 for discount.”
Us: “But we don’t want the vodka. We want the whisky and the wine. Number 3 and number 1 only.”
She ponders again, placing a hand first on the wine, then the whisky.
Seller: “Ok.” She pauses. “There is a special offer. You can take two of number 3 and one of number 2 for discount.”

After an eternity, the sun seeming to set, rise, and start setting again, we wound up paying and leaving, with two of number 3, one of number 2, and not even one bottle of strawberry wine. Whether they had run out, and only had the display taster bottle left is a mystery our Chinese skills can never solve.