I’ve been living in Taiwan for 6 years and doing islandwide riding for all of those years and I remember that most roads in Taiwan weren’t that bad compared with where I come from (Quebec, Canada)…but in the last 2 or so years, many good roads have gone from being in great and safe condition to absolute insanity…
I woke up this morning and heard the birds chirping so I decided to pull a Ferris Bueller and head out for some traffic free riding…and it was relitively quiet out there…and I can understand why…The #3 (Tai San) used to be a nice flowing country road with 2 lanes in each direction. a few years back, I would thrash up and down it on my CBR600RR and it would always be a hoot…later that summer (2003), several typhoons hit Taiwan and #3 received some damage in the form of sink holes, landslides, potholes and lots of washed out areas…Now I’m talking about almost 3 years ago…Since then, It has received next to no repairs and it has just gotten worse…I hadn’t been up that rooad for a few months now and I had been told that extensive repairs had been done…I went to check it out and the extensive repairs that I expected actually came in the form of extensive butchering…the road is now patched everywhere, diesel spills every corner, bumps, humps, lumps, jumps, holes, craters, ripples, unpainted lines and some tasty roadkill for good measure!..A real delight of a road!..
I am glad that I don’t have a sportbike anymore but I’m definetly not impressed at seeing roads that resemble the aftermath of war in Iraq!..To make things even more exiting, several cars going the opposite direction thought that it would be cool for them to overtake a slow moving truck and come into my lane head on…and they just kept doing their bonehead move without getting back into their lane!..Nuts!
We all know that the sleazy backwater cronies in the Govt don’t care about how safe or unsafe the roads are in Taiwan, but are they really that blind…don’t they feel and see how bad it is when they drive their nice new latest model Benz’s and BMWs when they drive over these so-called “roads”?..and when is “enough” really “enough”?..because I can’t see how much worse the roads can get before actually taking away their designation as roads and turning them to trails!.. :fume:
I heard the roads in Haiti aren’t that bad!!! 
[/i]