Sun Moon Lake

This is the beautiful Sun Moon Lake. It is a beautiful area with actual clean water in the lake itself. I was told the lake has crystal clear water. It was not, but it was still much cleaner than any of the bodies of water I've seen so far.
I got up close and personal with the lake on August 31 with 18,000 other swimmers, 246 of which were foreigners (American, British etc.). It is 3.3 Kilometers (approx. 2 miles) across the lake and we swam across. It was awesome and I'm ready to do it again.

Since they have that many people swimming across they have several regulations in place.
People in Taiwan don't swim much. Most people you meet do not swim at all. There is a great fear of the water here, which baffles me considering that this is an island.
To participate in this event you must be on a team of at least five people, preferably ten. You must swim with some sort of flotation device. You must wear the vibrantly colored pink swim cap they provide for you once you get there.

So we managed to pull together ten people and got our swim on. Five of us (Mike, Laura, George, Josh and myself) went down on Sat with a tour group. That will be another post.

The first picture is of Susanne and Lauren at the lake.

This picture is of Susanne, Lauren and myself after Susanne and I have gotten our mandatory flotation devices inflated. Lauren couldn't swim with us, because she is in the final stages of recovery from back surgery. Next year though.

The mass amounts of people waiting to swim in pink caps. This is just a small fraction of the crowd. People start swimming at 7 am and they send people off in stages to make sure there is enough room for everyone. It's well organized.


This is our team: Laura, me, Susanne, Matt, Mike, Josh, Pat (who is from Green Bay), George and Caleb. There is also a girl named Jill on our team, but you can't see her because she's standing in the back and is short. Lauren took bunches of pictures (and I've stolen all these from her) and is going to send me more, so I will do another post of pics soon I hope.We had to walk through a shower before we could enter the lake, because we are filthy, filthy animals and should not contaminate the lake with our unwashed bodies. There were several of these on the other side of the lake too. Those were very nice for washing the lake off.
And we're off.

I had planned to swim slow and lazy across the lake and to just hang out with Susanne most of the way, but we all got separated pretty quickly. I ended up swimming the whole way by myself. Periodically I would stop and try to find my teammates. This proved to be more difficult than I would have thought. I figured I would just look for the lemon/lime green tubes we were all using. Turns out we weren't the only ones using them. Ah well.
So I got to the end and before I got out of the lake I decided to hang around and wait for at least one teammate so I wouldn't have to stand around by myself and look lost. About five minutes later Mike swam into view and we were the first ones from our team out of the water.
It took us about an hour and a half to do it.

After you get out of the water you are herded through the showers and to the refreshment area. The first thing you come upon is a hot tea of sorts that is great when you've just swam across a lake and it's 80+ degrees outside. Please note the sarcasm when I say that. I don't actually know what it was, but I think it was supposed to be some sort of restorative beverage that was rather nasty. Move on to the table full of gatorade type drinks. I pretty much dislike any form of gatorade, but there was no water immediately available to I took what I could.

Susanne came in about ten minutes after we did. We proceeded to stand and sit around in the sun for the next couple of hours while we waited for the rest of our team to come in and to get our food and other assorted rewards for participating.
This turned out to be incredibly dumb on my part. I applied copious amounts of sun block before leaving the hotel, but spending an hour and a half in the water and then sitting around in the midday Taiwan sun negated any effort I put forth to prevent the massive sunburn I got. I would have put clothes on and reapplied sunblock, but all of that was on the bus that I had no access to until it was time to leave. Next year I will wear a rashguard and possibly a hat.