We left Tainan at just after 5am this morning (Tuesday morning), although I had wanted to leave at 4am (I set my alarm for 3.30am but slept clean through it!). The early start was warranted in order to avoid best part of the Chinese New Year traffic on the road south to Pingtung; however, the long stretch of highway between Jiadong and Fangliao was already a virtual car park by just before 7am (everyone else had obviously had the same idea as me, and they were trying to get down to Kenting "early"). With it being Chinese New Year, there was never any chance of talking to the engineers (they weren't there), but the idea was to re-take some shots I had made a pig's ear of last summer, and to let my friend see Mudan reservoir for the first time. There was a lot of cloud on the way down, but fortunately most of it cleared up by the time we arrived there, though there was still just enough to make the odd "moody" shot possible...
Instead of shooting the dam stairwell up close, I chose to snap it with the 250mm from a distance away on the mountain spur; the lack of visual compression gives a better sense of scale...
Since the water level was quite low (this being the dry season and the reservoir's irrigation supply having been temporarily suspended), we were able, on our approach to the reservoir, to cross the river downstream from the weir and look back across it with the sun behind us, which I hadn't been able to do on my own last year...
I was also able to make a minor discovery - what I had previously thought were reeds on the other side of the fishladder, were actually growing inside the bloody thing! It was also full of rocks and all kinds of debris. So no baby fishies then...
Somebody took all morning to finally take her coat off; for February, today was scorching hot - we both ended up with sunburn...
Back up top on the crest of the dam, looking out north-eastward across the reservoir itself...
The spillway tainter gates viewed from the upstream side. This was the only shot I took all day long for which I found a use for the new, graduated ND filters rather than the polarizer...
The wharf for the various types of boat employed by the reservoir's management staff...
Upon driving up alongside the northern river, I was thinking about what I had previously thought was a "broken" weir somewhat upstream. I'm now unsure what the hell it is; on the one hand, it consists simply of stacked gabions through which water could easily pour (if not tear apart at a high enough pressure) and would therefore make more sense as these things are usually deployed - as protective measures against soil erosion in the sides of slopes; on the other hand, it lies perpendicular to the flow of the river - hence my initial conclusion that it had previously served as a kind of weir. I really don't know what to think of it at the moment...
Further upstream at the actual/new weir, there was some remedial work being carried out to construct new retaining walls to either side of it to constrain the subsidence.
On the way back from the reservoir, we stopped at one of the many onion fields to which the Mudan river supplies irrigation water....
I bought a bag of white onions too, but left them behind at a 7-11 without realizing it until we got back to Tainan... I blamed it on being tired; we didn't get back to Tainan until 5pm.
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