"Plum blossoms everywhere, once you've seen them, it's hard to go home" — the New Central Cross-Island Highway was packed for three days

A photo was also taken of the traffic jam on the elevated section of the Fengqiu segment of the New Central Cross-Island Highway, about 18 kilometers away from the bottleneck at the Zhongshan Bridge in Shuili, with a slogan added for "amusement." (Provided by Chang Sheng-zheng)

Evening traffic congestion at Longshen Bridge, about 6 kilometers from the Shuili district. (Photo by Shen Hui-sheng)

Plum blossoms have erupted in Xinyi Township, Nantou County, causing a massive influx of vehicles on the New Central Cross-Island Highway. Nearly 3 days saw 50,000 to 150,000 visitors, especially on the evening of the 14th when the returning traffic jam stretched 20 kilometers from Shuili back to Bishi, leaving locals complaining they couldn’t leave home and plum blossom tourists lamenting they couldn’t get back. Zhang Sheng-zheng, the factory manager of Xinyi’s Plum Dream Factory, even created a meme online saying: "Plum blossoms everywhere, once you've seen them, it's hard to go home!"

Zhang Sheng-zheng pointed out that during last month’s press conference for the "Tracking Snow to Find Plum Blossoms" series of events, Huang Chih-hui, the general manager of the Xinyi Township Farmers' Association, predicted based on winter humidity, cold fronts, and the bud conditions of plum trees that this year’s plum blossom display "should be the best in the past decade or so." As expected, areas such as Tuchang, Waipingding, and Wusong had already bloomed quite well during the weekend of the 7th.

After 80,000 to 90,000 plum blossom tourists visited on the 13th and posted images of the blooming spectacle online, a huge crowd surged in on the 14th, estimated at around 150,000 people. Due to ongoing widening construction at Zhongshan Bridge in Shuili creating a traffic bottleneck, the returning traffic in the afternoon backed up all the way to Fengqiu and Bishi. Even residents of nearby Xinxiang and Lona tribes found it difficult to leave their homes.

Some locals who knew the area well took shortcuts through riverbed gravel truck paths, but some who followed them to this shortcut hesitated at the steel plank bridge over the stream at the entrance, causing the detour route to become congested as well.

Some people made the best of the situation, taking photos of the traffic jams and creating memes labeled with phrases like "If it’s not jammed now, wait another 10 years" and "We said we’d come together… and got stuck in traffic" to amuse themselves.

Zhang Sheng-zheng said that on the 14th there seemed to be over 150,000 visitors, with about three-quarters wanting to enter the Plum Dream Factory but unable to due to the crowds. Despite this, the day’s revenue still hit its highest level in recent months, reaching NT$800,000. On the 15th, the visitor count was estimated at around 50,000, with minor but not severe traffic jams, and the factory’s single-day revenue was about NT$500,000.