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Taiwan Expedition Log

August 9-29, 2008
September 5, 2008 update

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Tuesday August 26, 2008

After a breakfast buffet, equaling our previous night's dinner, we returned to our room to work. Today was a processing day, where each accession is checked for good health, proper moisture levels, and repackaged if necessary. Then comes identification of unidentified plants, using both the printed Woody Flora of Taiwan and the On-line Flora. Next was the least fun part of the process ... paperwork. Every accession must be documented as to how many of each and whether it is a tuber, seed, spore, or plant. After a full day and night, we still weren't quite finished, but nothing a short morning couldn't wrap up.

Wednesday August 27, 2008

We finished our paperwork early, and after indulging again in the giant buffet breakfast, we were off to the Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine (BAPHIQ) office to get our phytosanitary certificates. For me, this is always the biggest headache of the trip and today would be no exception. Finding the Inspection office was quite easy our hotel concierge explained ... go out the front door on Highway 12, head west for almost an hour and after there are no more buildings, look for the giant yellow one. That's too easy, we thought, but sure enough, other than arriving in only 30+ minutes, she was right on track.

When we walked into the Plant Quarantine office and asked about phytos, we were first greeted with frantic looks of terror, then with "We can't do that here", followed by, "Do you have an import certificate?", and then, "Open your boxes". The meticulous inspections were going along fine until the inspector announced each of our plants had to be weighed separately ... 8.4 grams of asarum, 12.2 grams of arisaema, and so forth. After several hours, we completed that worthless task, then we were asked for a total weight for each genus, then a total weight for the entire shipment. These folks were used to shipping huge cartons of plants and were trying to apply the same rules to our tiny boxes of plant samples. At least the inspectors were nice about the bureaucratic nightmare as they brought us several cups of hot tea, instant noodles for lunch, and then lemon wafers when we turned down the noodles. Finally after 6 hours of stressful bureaucratic hell, we finished and were issued our phytos, which we took to the post office next door and mailed our samples home. We hope these will survive in our ex-situ conservation setting and that some may even turn out to be great garden plants for gardeners both in the US and around the world.

Thursday August 28, 2008

With our plant work behind us, all that remained was completing both our plant notes and expedition logs, then taking our rental car to our airport hotel 3 hours north. We hated to leave the wonderful Splendor Hotel in Taichung, but Taoyuan awaited. We arrived at the City Suites Gateway Hotel within eyeshot of the airport in time for lunch and our rendevous with Nielson from Central Auto Rental to pick up our rental van. The City Suites is another hotel I recommend with high marks if you need a place near the airport. Only a few hours remain now before we board our plane home and resume our "normal" life. We count ourselves very fortunate to have had such a wonderful trip with near perfect weather, great hotels and food, no illness, no snakes or even land leeches, and minimal incidents of getting lost. The trip was almost good enough to make us forget our terrible first day. There is still much botanizing work to be done and I am more convinced than ever there are still plenty of new species to be discovered in Taiwan's central mountains. I hope this provides an unvarnished insight into the possibilities.

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