Taiwan Trip: Food, food, food

I may have loved the Taipei 101, our fantastic hotel and all the amazing hiking, but the #1 reason that I'd go back to Taiwan is for the food. I'd never have put Chinese food that high on my list of favourite cuisines, but after our trip it's rapidly moving up. As usual, we ate more than was good for us, and moaned several times about there only being 3 meals a day!

I found this fantastic blog which has so many restaurants all over Taipei to try, and I'd definitely recommend having a look at it for ideas if you're headed there.

Our food photos aren't great because we were far too busy eating everything! Dumplings were our favourite savoury thing by far, but our absolute favourite thing was the cheap, fresh and delicious fruit. Mango, pineapple and dragonfruit are my personal favourites, and we ate a lot of them all. Mmmmm. No photos, which is for the best because I'm already salivating at the thought and if I was gazing at a photo too my keyboard would be awash with saliva!!

On that delightful image, let the photos commence...

I know I already posted this photo but there you go...

At Shilin Night Market. Crab, garlic greens and rice. Cheap and yummy! But we didn't love night markets here. I think we were spoilt when we were in South East Asia before. The Taiwanese ones  we went to are a bit mad! Plus we might be fairly adventurous eaters, but there are limits and Taiwanese/Chinese cooking definitely goes beyond them!

Dumplings for lunch at the National Palace Museum...

...and we loved them so much that we went for more dumplings at Din Tai Fung for dinner. Din Tai Fung was amazing, we went twice but I still have no good photos because we started devouring the food the second it hit the table! They have branches in Japan too, and next time we're in Tokyo I think I know where we'll be heading! I was sad that there wasn't a branch in Sendai but I think it's for the best that there isn't or I'd be waving goodbye to my waistline!

Beef noodle soup. Tasty enough, but a bit too like ramen for our tastes. 

Shaved ice, covered in mango and strawberry ice cream. So tasty!

We went to Modern Toilet, a bathroom themed restaurant. The food was average, the decor and theming was brilliant!

John and his dinner

Poo ice-cream for dessert!

Anyone else's tummy rumbling?!

PS - Rurousha, you can tell the Hero this post is a give to him from me :p

Taiwan Trip: High in the Sky

Since I have well documented my brief love affair with the Taipei 101, you won't be surprised to hear that we spent out last afternoon there going up to the top. It was ridiculous. The weather was fairly misty and muggy and we didn't have the best views, but they were good enough to tell how ridiculously high you were. Usually when you go up tall buildings, people look like ants. When you're at the top of the Taipei 101, buildings look like ants. 

Where Skyscraper meets shopping mall

There are displays of intricately carved coral at the top. They're gorgeous, but rather random!

Hello down there 15 story building. You look so small I could squash you with a finger.

Somewhere just in the forest to the left of the photo is where we sat to take these photos.

Sun was in the wrong place for photos from the outside deck, but it was extremely beautiful.

The thing in the background is the damper. It's a big ball that stops the building falling over. I don't understand how, I chose just to trust it. The thing John is cuddling is the Damper Baby. Because it's not only Japan that makes everything cute :)

Taipei 101 with the really big moon there was that night. I'll miss you!

Taiwan Trip: Caoling Historic Trail

After our return from Taroko Gorge, you'd have thought we'd be fed up with hiking and want some city life, but we found the call of the wild too strong, and on the following day, we got the train north to Fulong to walk the Caoling Historic Trail. This is part of a 200 year old route that was set up to help the Taiwanese settle the fertile Langyang Plain to the East. The section you can walk goes from Fulong (well actually about 2km along a marked track/road from Fulong) to Dali (about 8km). You can apparently continue on along a valley path to Daxi, which makes for a full days walk, but since we wanted to get back to Taipei, we just did the shorter walk.

It's a very well marked and well walked footpath. Apparently on a nice weekend afternoon it can get really busy, but we went early-ish on a sunny Saturday morning, and people were few and far between. It was a lot more tame than the walks we'd done in Taroko Gorge, but there were still a lot of steps. It was much hotter too, and we only just had enough water. There are vending machines at the start of the trail, and shops in Fulong, but nothing at all in Dali except one little ice cream stand.

Decoration in Fulong

On the way from Fulong to the start of the trail

Start of the trail

Lots and lots and lots of stairs

This says "Boldly Quell the Mists" (雄鎮蠻煙). It was inscribed by Liu-Ming Deng, the Taiwanese regional commander, in 1867 because he walked the trail and was struck with how difficult it was, so he engraved this as a monument to the people who opened up this part of Taiwan.

The same guy that engraved the other stone engraved this one with a symbol for tiger. Apparently there's an old Chinese saying "Clouds obey the dragon, winds obey the tiger", so he wrote tiger on here to stop the strong winds he encountered.

View of Dali from above.

John made me climb up a lot more steps to a higher hut. It was very pretty though, so I'll let him off!

John sitting in the hut.

Temple of the Jade Emperor at Dali

Taiwan Trip: Hiking in Taroko Gorge

As I said in my last post, Taroko Gorge is amazingly beautiful. Unfortunately, the whole of Taiwan knows this, and they all flood there in their bus tours to see it. Fortunately, buses aren't very good at driving off road, people are mostly lazy, and time on tours is always tight (due to the need to go and stop off at the bus driver's mate's shop on the way home). This means that it is very easy to escape idiotic bus tours, as long as you're prepared to do a bit of walking, and your self-preservation instinct isn't all that high.

One false step and you're tumbling down the mountainside. But on the plus side, no people!

Like everywhere else we hiked in Taiwan, we were very pleasantly surprised by the organisation and upkeep of hiking trails in Taroko Gorge. Whilst there are some trails closed due to landslides, all the open trails were easy to follow, well signposted and had information about items of interest as you walked along. There's good information here about the different day walks, and here about which ones are open. All the ones listed as "scenic trails" or "sights" on any website you see are likely to be short walks with wide paths, stairs and probably full of people. When we were there nowhere was so busy to be unpleasant, but from what I've read it would be a different story at the weekend.

All very easy and everything, but where's the fun in hiking if you can't pretend to be Indiana Jones?

We walked three of the short scenic "trails", which only took about 30minutes each, but were very enjoyable and pretty. 

The Xiangde Temple Trail was right next to our hotel. It was just a lot of steps up to a pagoda and temple.  Lovely views from the top, but I wouldn't exactly call it hiking!

You can climb all the way to the top of the Pagoda for a super good view!

View down the gorge

We also walked the Wenshan Hot Springs Trail. It was about 3km north of our hotel along the main road, and conveniently on the way to the main trail we walked. It's a lot of steps and a suspension bridge down to and across the river to some hot springs on the other side. They were far too hot for us, so we didn't stop to bathe, but they were in a lovely setting. 

Scary bridge #1 of many!

Pretty good place for a bath, hey?

If you thought I was being a wuss, this is the bridge I was on. Scary!

The third easy trail we did was the Lushui Trail. This was south of our hotel, at the far end of the trail we did. It's 2km long, and is just about worthy of being called a trail, unlike the 2 above! It's fairly flat and wide, easy to walk and has lovely views of the gorge.

I wish there was a person at the bottom to give a sense of scale. The boulders were gigantic.

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While those three walks were very enjoyable, they were really just warm ups and cool downs for the main walk we did, the Wenshan-Lushui Trail. This wasn't the walk we'd originally planned to do, but the ones we wanted to walk were closed due to landslides. This actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as this one was much more challenging, and we both decided afterwards it was absolutely the best thing we did in Taiwan. Walking in the jungle, the only things keeping us company were the copious amount of pretty butterflies, the few monkeys(!) we saw and the beautiful scenery all around.

The trail's only 5.5km long, but it took us about 3 and a half hours. We're usually fast walkers, but this trail was HARD. The first section (coming from Wenshan) was constant up and down for about 2km. That section alone took us 2 hours. There was scrambling up sheer rock, hanging onto ropes to stop yourself falling off ledges, and clinging onto trees and you half slid down muddy slopes. But it was amazing. If you go to Taroko, bring hiking boots and challenge yourself. You won't regret it (well, you might regret your decision about 2km into the trail, but it does get easier, I promise). Just make sure you start from the Wenshan end. 

As you can tell from the photos, the day was cloudy and misty, but still some fantastic views. 

The suspension bridge that started the trail

If I remember rightly, that's our hotel in the middle

I know it's only a tunnel, and up close it was actually very industrial, but I like to think it's secretly Rivendell.

Exhausted by triumphant: at the end of the final climb.

A railing to reassure. 

John likes mushrooms (and ants and spiders and various other things that make me go eugh)

Taiwan Trip: Silks Place, Taroko Gorge

When planning our Taiwan holiday, we decided we needed a treat. I'm not really sure why, since we don't work that hard, but we decided we did. And as soon as we found Silks Place in Taroko Gorge, we knew that it was the hotel to treat ourselves in.

Taroko Gorge is in the East of Taiwan, part of Taroko National Park, near Hualien. 4 million years ago, the Eurasian and the Philippine Sea Plate crashed together, forced up mountains in Taiwan, including the marble that had been formed within them by previous tectonic activity. Add to this 4 million years of the Liwu River running through this marble, and the result is Taroko Gorge. Taroko means "Magnificent and Beautiful", and I can't think of a more appropriate name.

The native people of Taroko Gorge are the Atayal, who lived here in peace until 1914, when the Japanese entered to gain access to the mineral and forest resources. The Atayal tried to resist them, and so naturally the Japanese slaughtered most of them. They cut roads and trails through the gorge, often following old Atayal hunting and trading routes, and it soon became a popular hiking spot. It's remained so ever since, and is now Taiwan's top tourist destination.

Because of this, there are unfortunately scores of bus tours winding up the road through the gorge. Fortunately, you can easily get away from these crowds on the hiking trails, and I'm much obliged to them really because it's due to them that Silks Place was built. 

Silks Place is a 5* Hotel, in Tienxsiang, about half way through the gorge. Neither John and I are usually 5* hotel people (we'd generally rather rough it and have longer holidays) but we heard words like 'rooftop jacuzzi', 'swimming pool', 'all you can eat buffet', and we were sold! And when we found out rooms were only £150 a night, including dinner and breakfast, we decided it was the perfect treat.

And it was! We had a delicious 2 days there. Lovely, helpful staff, great facilities, absolutely amazing, stuff yourself so full your stomach aches for hours afterwards buffet dinners and breakfast, and hiking right on the doorstep. It was completely fantastic, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone going to Taiwan. Since we didn't spend any extra money while we were there, those days didn't come out as much more expensive than any others on our holiday. And it felt so luxurious, swanning about in a white dressing gown, swimming before breakfast, relaxing in a jacuzzi after dinner, sitting on a balcony looking out at the view and reading a good book...am I making you jealous yet?!

More about the hiking in my next post, but for now here are some photos!

Ahhhhh, the comfiest bed I've slept in for 6 months :D

Gorgeous setting too!

The Children's John and Susie play area. Complete with Wii and Table Tennis (I really suck at both!)

Feet in the pool, relaxing by the fire.

John was so excited about having cereal...

...while I was more excited about the fruit and cake!

View from our balcony

Using the yoga studio before dinner

Selection of Asian dishes for dinner

Half of the salad selection...there were also cold meats, normal salad, and most importantly CHEESE and BROWN BREAD. Ahhhhh.

Cake and fruit selection. Hard to get a good photo, but there were lots. And they were all delicious. And I had 3 pudding plates a night. Mmmmmm.

And if all that wasn't enough, it came with a steak of your choice...we both had lamb both nights because lamb is amazingly delicious and you can't get good stuff in Japan. So much delicious, so much indigestion! Good thing we did lots of active stuff during the day to burn off the million calories we ate!

Relaxing in the rooftop jacuzzi after dinner

The little indoor pool. There was a big on behind where I'm standing, but this one had ducks ^o^

I hope that made you all suitably jealous...I certainly made myself jealous that I'm not still there! Ahh well, I suppose now it's time to work to save up for the next treat :D