Day 2 - 29th May 2012 - Taipei

On the 2nd day, we have engaged a local driver to bring us around the city. Specifically, we have asked to cover Yeliu, Jiufen and Jingguashi area since these places are not too accessible by their local JieYun (MRT).

We took our breakfast at Macdonalds that morning and started our day trip at 930am to avoid the morning traffic rush. It took almost an hour to reach from Taipei main station to Yeliu park.

Yeliu GeoPark
Yeliu is located at Wanli of New Taipei City, Yeliu is full of seawater-eroded holes as well as numerous rockes in the shape of mushroom, candle, ginger and chessboards. The rocks have gone through marine, wind, sun , rain, northeastern monsoon erosion. The whole park extends to 1700 meters long and will take about 2 hours to complete the whole park tour.

Different forms of rocks to be seen in the park

With the fairy's shoe statue

Cartoon Queen's head

this place attracted many visitors from China

don't ask me what rocks are these (there's a name for them)

Up close with nature

The queue to take a pic with the Queen's head was extremely long

so we decided to take the Queen's head from another angle

Exhausted! after 1.5 hours of walk around the park

Beautiful coastline - the black rocks were contaminated with oil spills from the sea

Our local driver told us that the seafood here were fresh and recommended that we should give them a try (where the fishermen cooks their daily catches for tourists). We gave it a miss as we were still full after drinking their aloe honey drink and snacking at the small market near the geopark.

Jiufen Old Street
It was another half an hour's ride from Yeliu to Jiufen, so by the time we reached Jiu fen, we started to hunt around for food. Despite being Tuesday, this place is crowded with tourists from all over the world. What makes the walk slightly difficult was that it started to rain.

Jiufen, a former gold mining village, was said to have gotten its name when the town had only nine families. The families were so close that each time when one shipped an item over, they would ship nine portions (or Jiufen). This place is known to have many local delicacies and interesting snacks (like peanut rolls, taro balls, fishballs)

near the entrance, before the rainfall

Very nice fish balls and noodles and only costs us NTD100 for 4 bowls!

A must try ice-cream dessert mix with grinded sugared peanuts - Peanut Rolls

JinGuaShi
This place preserves some of the area's Japanese era buildings and contains a museum which tells the story of gold mining in the area. The park is opened without any entrance fees but you need to buy a ticket to enter the museum buildings and the Crown Prince Chalet. There is also the Benshan Fifth Tunnel which visitors can enter to gain an experience of what conditions were like for the miners.

Some of the other attractions in the town include the Golden Waterfall (黃金瀑布) and the two-colored sea (陰陽海).

Old Japanese house layout

Golden Waterfall

As we finished our scheduled day tour at about 5pm, our local driver told us that he would only end the day with us during nightfall (which is near 7pm during May/Jun), he offered to send us back to hotel after our night market trip at Yonghe (which is near Dingxi station). As we were too exhausted to return back to our hotel on our own, we took up his offer and had to hunt down a dinner stall to meet his time schedule.

Our first night market at Yonghe

We found this teppanyaki food restuarant along the night market and it serves really good food at a reasonably low price (NTD 500 per family). As it was still quite early, some of the mobile food stalls were not set up as yet after our dinner, but I managed to buy shoes from one of the shops. There were quite good selection of taiwan made shoes at a low price that are very comfortable. The night market is clean but the only issue is that motorists are free to drive through the passage way which made our walk slightly difficult with the boys.