XIAO WULAI on Northern Cross-Island Highway (北橫小烏來)

First part of our trip along the Northern Cross-Island Highway in Taiwan. Xiao Wulai is a scenic area where you can walk on a glass bottom platform over a waterfall, Jiaobanshan has a nice park with interesting art and historic sites.

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Also watch the latest video on this channel: "{Trip} LALASHAN on the Northern Cross-Island Highway (北橫拉拉山)"    • 🌄 LALASHAN Northern Cross-island High...  
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From Travel in Taiwan (11/12, 2016) article:

Author: Rick Charette

Jiaobanshan & Little Wulai
Highway 7, which stretches about 130km, begins at history-rich Daxi town in the west, follows the Dahan River to its upper reaches, and jumps the Xueshan (Snow Mountain) Range, ending by the coast on Yilan County’s Lanyang Plain.
Our first stop was Jiaobanshan Park. Clear signage (with English) along Highway 7 points you down County Highway 117, to “Central Fuxing.” The park entrance is on the right of the main road, down a short alley, just as you enter Fuxing, a cluster of a few-score buildings. The quiet, pretty landscaped grounds (free entry) take up a wide plateau right behind the settlement, high over the exaggeratedly serpentine Dahan River, twisting like a giant dragon forcing a mountain egress. The central attraction in the park is a villa – the Jiaobanshan Resort – once used by Chiang Kai-shek, now a museum filled with photos of events past.
Visit the underground command-post bunker complex – the War Preparedness Tunnel – inside the plateau beneath the villa, dug out should the Generalissimo come under attack from Mao Zedong’s red forces, and take the well-maintained plateau-escape trail down to a graceful suspension bridge on the river, where back when a speedboat always stood ready to whisk CKS downriver to the Daxi command base should the main highway be cut off.
Other plateau-top buildings house displays on the region’s logging and camphor-production days. Before early 1900s synthetic-camphor production began, Taiwan was a key natural-camphor producer. Beyond trading, first contact between Han Chinese and island mountain tribes often came with Han camphor-extraction incursions.

Further along Highway 7, a left turn takes you uphill along County Highway 115 to the Little Wulai Scenic Area. The turnoff is just before the 7 jumps the Dahan to its south (left bank) side. A short way up a tributary, the scenic area is centered on a picturesquely rugged gorge and the loud, hurtling waterfall that exclaims its end. From the parking lot (NT$100 per vehicle), a gorge-side walkway takes you a few hundred meters to the glass-bottom Little Wulai Skywalk (NT$50 adults; closed noon-1pm), boldly extended directly over the 50m-high falls. This is a hanging-valley waterfall; the cliffs directly below you are an active fault line.

For more exercise than that offered along the short above-falls pathway, the steep, 750m Fall Base walk is highly recommended. Clearly signposted in English, it starts not far from the skywalk and takes you to a scenic spot from where you can see the waterfall in all its glory from below.

The Northern Cross-Island Highway
This is one of three stunningly scenic highways that snake their way east-west over Taiwan’s thick north-south mountain spine. The names of the other two begin with “Central” and “Southern,” respectively. All were major projects undertaken by the Nationalist government, worried about the Communist China threat, to facilitate cross-island military movement, especially should round-island coastal-area movement be cut off. This route initially was just a narrow garrison road hacked out by the Japanese during their 1895-1945 suzerainty, augmenting Atayal-tribe control. The Nationalist government widened, smoothed, and paved it 1963~1966.

English and Chinese
Atayal tribe 泰雅族
Dahan River 大漢溪
Daxi 大溪
Fall Base 瀑布底
Fuxing 復興
Jiaobanshan Park 角板山公園
Jiaobanshan Resort 角板山行館
Lalashan 拉拉山
Little Wulai Scenic Area 小烏來風景區
Little Wulai Skywalk 小烏來天空步道
Northern Cross-Island Highway 北部橫貫公路
War Preparedness Tunnel 戰備隧道
Xueshan Range 雪山山脈