The Four Beasts Mountains (四獸山) are hills with a set of hiking trails within the Eastern Taipei city limits. There are loads of hiking trails, and I wish we'd had time to walk them more. Apparently they're all lit at night and pretty easy to follow. Since time was tight, we only had time to walk Elephant Mountain (象山). This is the easiest to access; just a 15 minute walk from the bottom of the Taipei 101 and we were in lovely jungley-forest, and another 20 minute walk and we were at the top of a hill, with gorgeous views over Taipei and, of course, the Taipei 101. We wanted to watch the sunset, and apparently so did a lot of other people, so it was a little busy, but everyone was friendly and there was a nice atmosphere. I'd recommend getting there by about 5 if you want to get somewhere to sit (and by somewhere to sit, I mean have a boulder to climb on!). There were loads of guys with tripods, twiddling with lots of dials and obviously doing very fancy things with their cameras, but I'm pleased with how our little photos came out!
I found out about it on this blog here. It also has maps of the whole hiking system and information about the other hikes you can do there. It also has some beautiful photos.
I'd thoroughly recommend going to Elephant Mountain if you're in Taipei. Even if you're not a big hiker, it was all steps to get to the top, and judging by the 6 inch heels I saw some girls wearing, it's not exactly essential to have hiking gear!
And now, lots of Taipei 101 photos. Hurrah!
After a lot of trial and error, we eventually managed to get onto the last remaining rock, so we had somewhere to sit and enjoy the sunset :)
Oh, so mature. Hehe. Rurousha, I think this is what the statue from the last post saw!
John playing with miniaturisation mode. He loves it, I think it looks stupid.
It's the leaning tower of Taipei.
Sunset wasn't as good as the night before unfortunately, but it was still lovely.
