Second Nanhua Reservoir (南化水庫) Trip

I was out all day at Nanhua reservoir (南化水庫) today (I mean Sunday, though I'm posting this in the early hours of Monday morning. I was also out there for a good couple of hours on Saturday afternoon too during the rain) to take pictures and explore from the south end across the east and up to the north end. On Saturday I went further along the west side and under the dam chute through to an open-air museum of military relics and beyond (I may leave that for a seperate post).

Although it was fairly bright today, it was also very humid, so I deliberately allowed myself to shoot on F8 - F9.5 with the shutter speed slightly lower than the light itself would have suggested on the theory that a post-hoc reduction in image brightness would clarify the image whilst preserving the colour (though of course as the afternoon drew on and the light changed, I had to adjust). For example, the following image was taken from the south end of the reservoir whilst standing about three feet deep in the water and holding the camera as close to the surface as I dared...


Since I had the camera set to double-shoot, I took two almost identical images. Below is practically the same image, but with the brightness reduced considerably...


Funnily enough, a split second after I took this (or another similar) image, a fish jumped out of the water... damn. I briefly imagined myself standing in the water behind a tripod hoping to "catch" fish.

My four-legged escapadist, meanwhile, took to the water with some sort of similarly mad idea...


On the subject of catching fish, before we had got down to the water's edge (and again on the way back) I stopped to talk with this family fishing the shallows off the bridge...


The two dudes had had a few tins of Taiwan beer, but the only fish in their bucket were a few skinny mullets; they had a little girl and her mother with them so presumably they weren't too keen on anything more ambitious. There were a couple of those typical Taiwanese make-shift boats made out of plastic piping tied up along down toward the reservoir and I wondered (but didn't ask) what the protocol is (if any) for using one of them to go out onto the water. I also asked them if they knew whether there was a road down from the east side to get a closer look at the waterfall bringing the water into Nanhua from up across the mountains in Jiaxian. They didn't know, but I eventually scoped out two or three possibilities. Here's a couple of pictures taken from the west side of the dam yesterday to show what I'm talking about...


The same thing in context...


Both of those images above were taken when it had been raining for several days on the trot, and you can clearly see that there is plenty of water gushing into the reservoir, but what you can't see from these stills is the violence with which it smashed its way down the chute; it must have been in the order of several tons per second. It was all drastic symphonic strings and cymbol clashes. Today however, it was dry and sunny, and up on the eastern mountainside the stream which must have led down to that headlong crash into the reservoir yesterday wasn't to be heard. Every stream I came across was barely a trickle.

However, route 179 around the reservoir to the southeast and eastern sides did occassionally offer spectacular views northward and toward the west with the dam, control station and observation platform (the views from which I criticized in my first post on Nanhua reservoir) clearly visible. This view is from the south end, more or less dead-on looking north...


The next image shows the observation platform covered in trees to the centre-left with the control station below that to the right, plus various boats and floats littering the foreground...


Zooming back out a bit this next image (which I cropped to avoid the now stubborn haze over the western mountains) shows the whole of the accessible west end of the reservoir from the observation platform and control station on the left to the complete span of the actual dam until it locks into the shoulder of the next mountain on the right. Notice how the lip of the release chute to the left seems to sit just below the high water mark on the dam; the dimensions to which that chute were constructed have to be exactly right to prevent water from flowing over the top of the dam during a peak. It would have been impressive to have seen it working during the rainfall spike of typhoon Morakot back in 2009.


Whilst on the east side overlooking the dam itself, I noted two or three possible little roads down to the falls I mentioned earlier, but since I wasn't sure which one to take, I decided to drive on northwards. On the way back, I took a little peep down the most likely candidate to let the dog stretch her legs, but decided I would leave a proper nosing for another time.

The road on the east side of the reservoir winds its way north at times smooth and firm, and other times ragged as a hag. Occassionally, the round mirrors at the bends are blocked by ferns meaning that bombing around like a madman isn't a good idea (of course that didn't stop about half of the people I saw driving around in their blue trucks [I know how to say the special name they give them {"fah-zai-chur"}, but does anyone know the characters?]). For one thing, there are other drivers and the occassional member of the animal kingdom to consider, for another thing, the road surface at the entry to a bend may be smooth, but it may be ragged and jagged as hell on the other side. There is also construction work going on at various places. At one point, for example, excavators were working on a new weir in order to protect the road from flooding. Though they were presumably in a desperate rush to finish before the summer rains begin, it looked to me as though they were perhaps half-finished at best...


Eventually, the road winds its way downhill to where the northern head of the reservoir comes clearly into view from the roadside. At this point the mountain shoulder on the west side begins to taper northeast, shaping the northern mouth of the reservoir in coordination with the jutting crag on the east; this is the entry point for the reservoir's chief tributary. This next image shows exactly that tapering of the western shoulder from the south side of the eastern crag...


And here is the subsequent, somewhat obscured, view from the northern side of that same crag...


The reservoir behind me, I followed the river north for a short while for no other reason than that it looked like a scene from my seven year old imagination on reading Tolkien's "Fellowship of the Ring"...


Eventually, however, enough was enough; the road was increasingly becoming just a glorified blob of dried cement and there didn't seem to be any possibility of crossing over to the western side, and if that wasn't enough, the mountains were beginning to shake their clouds at me and rumble idle threats of rain.


I must have made the right decision; on my way back the light started softening its sweep over everything with a sort of Bryan Ferry-esque class.

It's not wise to want to see and know everything.