Tseng-Wen Reservoir (曾文水庫) Trip

OK so I wanted to go out with my dog and see Tainan County's three reservoirs on account of this little short in the Taipei Times a week ago. Of the three, Tseng-Wen Reservoir (曾文水庫) is by far the largest (it is apparently the largest in all of Taiwan). Driving out there took just over an hour from my place in Tainan City, averaging 65kph. I headed out east bearing slightly north through Yongkang, Sinhua, Shan-Shan, Zuohzhen, Yujing, and Nanhua districts into Nanxi, where Tseng-Wen is located. It's a lovely drive once you get past Shan-Shan.


The toll guard let me in for NT$45 (down from NT$70 after consulting with his female colleague - I've no idea why they thought I deserved a concession price, I wasn't even really listening to them). To be honest, the charge could have been five times that amount and I wouldn't have been too bothered - but I would think NT$45 is still cheap even for families with lots of kids. There was an Information Centre with a convex glass design, which I thought was nice though I didn't bother with it other than to take a quick snap as I was somewhat time conscious. I will go back for another visit at some point, and then I'll have a look around - maybe they have some reservoir stats, dam construction pictures and old black and whites from before the dam was built. I'll look next time.

This is a view of the Tseng-Wen reservoir (曾文水庫) dam from the approach road. The dumper trucks at the bottom of the image give a good indication of scale and the mass of rock and gravel surmounted by a perfectly even white strip cements the impression. This image was taken with the lens zoomed in slightly to avoid dwarfing the dam with the mountain to the immediate right and somewhat to the foreground of the image. The three gates to the top left of that picture, with their enormous concrete escape chutes, must be an awesome sight in action....

This image shows the gates from the rear at the top of the dam; they're about 100 ft high or so.


The resevoir itself is a fair size; whereas I thought I could have swam across the breadth (though not the length) of Nanhua in maybe 30-45 minutes, I can imagine taking quite a bit longer than that to swim across this thing (bear in mind that the distance will seem much smaller than it really is given that the lens is looking down at the water's surface from a 30-40 degree angle). Note that the vegetation line gives some indication of where the water level would rest when the reservoir is full...


... as corroborated by comparison with the water mark on the dam itself. Whilst I was pondering how to do something half-decent with the light, I spotted a buzzard over the blue of the water and then that was it - my amateur photographer's pensiveness went to shit as I started desperately changing over to the long lens and then snapping like a madman every time the bird banked and turned.



In the end I only managed the above two shots, which, though not at all "good" (as blurry as one of my saturday nights in Kaohsiung), at least allow a rudimentary identification of the bird: I'm thinking it might possibly have been a Black Kite (on account of the black win tips, and white vertical bars down the centre of the wings - compare with images here). Or perhaps it could have been a Eurasian Buzzard.


After a while, however, I got fed up with the heat and decided to head back and look for a waterfall in one of the tributaries in the surrounding mountains so I could take a little shower (I found one, but by then I couldn't be bothered with the camera, and just bundled myself [and the dog] straight into the water for a 5 minute cool off).


I'll write up my visits to Nanhua Reservoir (南化水庫) and WushanTou Reservoir (烏山頭水庫) maybe sometime this weekend or next week. After reading this action-packed tale, I'm sure you're all dying to know what happened...