My Exchange Semester in Taiwan: Hiking

Donnerstag, 8. Januar 2015

Week 11: Taipingshan (17.11 - 23.11.2014)

As the midterms were last week this week was not that busy as the weeks before. So I had again more free time.

On Sunday 23.11 we went to Taipingshan National Forest Recreation Area which is located in Yilan Country (around 65 km to the east from Taipei). To get there we rented a car with a driver who picked us up in Taipei and even brought us back in the evening. We were hiking around the Cueifong Lake (which is the largest alpine lake in Taiwan) and saw the old forestry railroad.
In the morning the weather was really good, but in the afternoon there were some clouds.

Old forestry railroad

Small water stream

The same railway a few meters further down the road

Taipingshan National Forest Recreation Area

Clouds are coming

Trees

Caterpillar

Bridge Nr. 10

Hiking path

Cueifong Lake

Hot spring (here you could cook eggs)

Donnerstag, 6. November 2014

Week 4 & 5: 29.9 – 12.10.2014

03.10.2014 I went to Maokong which is a suburb of Taipei and there it has some tea houses and hiking trails. To get to Maokong one can take the “Maokong Gondola” from the Taipei Zoo station.

04.10.2014 We wanted to go hiking at the Lion’s Head Mountain. To get there we had to take a train and a bus. The local train took 1.5 hours and the bus ride was another 2 hours, on the way back we took the high speed rail from Hsinchu station which took only 30 minutes to Taipei. So I think it is definitely worth to take the high speed rail over the local train.
The way was much longer than what we expected it to be and so we could not start the hike before 3 pm. Because we had to be back in Taipei at 7 pm, that left us only around two hours for hiking. But the hiking trail and the view were beautiful.

In the 5^th week there was the Taiwanese National Day on the 10^th of October. We planned to do some travelling outside of Taipei for this weekend but when we checked the flights and train tickets it turned out that everything was fully booked. We checked different places and sometimes it was even not possible to find a bed in a hostel. So we stayed in Taipei for this weekend.

On the morning of the National Day we went to see if there was something interesting going on. In some places the streets were closed and the air force did a fly-by but that was all we could see.