Day 2:

As I mentioned yesterday, the 4* hotel that we stayed at on the first night, turns out to be more of a 3* hotel. Breakfast wasn't particularly enjoyable plus their Taiwan Porridge (Taiwanese Taiwan Porridge) was no where as good as the Singaporean version. Anyway, after some delays from ONE PARTICULARLY IRRITATING family, we finally set off.

You would find that out of the 8 days I spent in Taiwan, some 60-70% of the time was spent on the bus travelling from one place to another. We would spent 40mins to 2 hours to the next location if we're lucky, or as long as 4 hours on the bus when we're not, and end up spending 15mins to 2hours (if it's a night market) at the next venue. I spent some time on the bus wondering if I would end up with DVT given the extended hours spent on the bus not moving at all.

Alright, first stop CKS Memorial Hall. It looks like a rip-off of Beijing's Tiantan (google it if you want to know how it looks like). We go there and look at the architecture and can't help but NOT BE AMAZED because I've been to Beijing and liked that one better. But they do have this HUGE statue of CKS and some carvings. Well, see for yourself.


Here's the entrance


Here's the Memorial Hall


And here's the huge statue I was talking about

Unimpressed, I left and after an excruciating bus ride, ended up in YehLiu. Yehliu is right next to the Pacific Ocean (I think?) and has some pretty interesting rock formations we were there to see.

There were the mushroom-shaped rocks:


One of which looked a little like someone's butt:


And one that looked like a woman's head:

Well this woman has a story behind her. Legend has it that the King of the Sea (I think) was so besotted with this Chinese goddess that he asked her to marry him. Of course, she would reject him and he ended up carving this particular rock for her.

After Yehliu, we endured another painful journey to Jiufen. However, Jiufen was easily the best place to go in Taiwan. Jiufen is really a small mountainous village set along the east of Taiwan. We did loads of shopping there, I brought back 4 packets of Mochi, a bracelet and a box of sun biscuits. My family bought an additional 4 packets of Mochi, 4 packets of peanuts, 4 packets of mango pudding, 1 box of sunbiscuits, 1 chess set and 3 packets of dried longans. The food there was unbelievably good as well. We tried their special fishballs with minched pork, mushroom or octopus in the centre and it was heavenly. Imagine eating hot piping, HUGE fishballs at 16 degree Celsius, sipping the hot piping soup, biting into the scalding hot fishballs as the gravy from the minced pork oozed out as you expose the entire portion. Simply addictive. Also imagine, sitting at a small table with 6 other people, holding onto a small paper bowl filled with piping hot rice drenched with a rich soy-sauce gravy specked with bits of fatty minced pork over your rice. If that isn't enough, imagine sitting in an empty shop and devouring a small of hot dessert containing red bean soup (my mum ate the beats and the sweet potato) with balls made from glutinous rice and sweet potato. Absolutely divine. That in a nutshell, is Jiufen for you. We didn't have time to explore every nook and cranny, although I wish we did. Be warned though, that place is extremely crowded. As the Taiwanese put it in English, "people mountain, people sea".

For our last destination which would also be the rest stop for the night, we heeded to Yilan, an area with one of the largest areas of flat land in Taiwan. Yilan is mainly an agricultural city, with lots of padi farmers. In Yilan, up on one of their mountains, sits the Yilan Shangri-La Leisure Farm. Now don't be fooled by its name, it has nothing to do with the Shangri-La that we all recognise. It's simply a name. Being a tourist destination, the orchard-hotel had most of its fruits plucked clean from the trees before we arrived. By the time we got there, there were only the tiny, obviously still growing guava fruits left to look at.


My little piglet friend at Yilan Shangri-La

On one of the rocky, dangerous looking bridges in the farm


A friendly duckling at the farm

Alright, that was a summary of Day 2 of my trip, I'll try to handle Day 3 when i find the time.