Final Taiwan thoughts from Lynette

After two weeks based in Taipei, we rented a car and headed out around the northeastern part of Taiwan.  Spending about 2 - 3 nights per location, we stayed in Jiufen, Jiaoxi, and Luodong.  The kids' posts include some of the things we saw.  

Jiufen is a cute mountain town with a famous old street with loads of shops and restaurants and beautiful tea houses overlooking the mountains and the ocean.  From this base, we visited the Yehliu Geopark, and the Jinguashi Gold Ecological Museum and hiked up teapot mountain.  Peyton and I also hiked up Mount Keelung to find a geocache.  Peyton has a post on teapot mountain and the gold museum.



After leaving Jiufen, we drove down the coast, stopping off at Fulong Beach for some swimming before arriving in the hot springs town of Jiaoxi.  See Talia's post for more details on this stop.  The hotel here, with the grotto-like hot spring pool on the roof, was the high point of the trip for the kids.  We also discovered hot pot restaurants here and we'll definitely be visiting more of these.  Outside of Taipei, getting by without Chinese has been a lot more difficult and we had to work a bit harder to figure out what we were ordering and what type of animal body parts we wished to avoid.  

The final stop in this part of the journey was the town of Luodong.  From this base, we biked along the river overlooking rice paddies, made (and ate) scallion pancakes, fed animals, and hiked through the Chinese hemlock forest in Taipingshan National Park.  Peyton's post provides some pictures and insights to the pancake and animal farm. The National Park was our chance to get up into the mountains and see a completely different ecosystem.  




Finally, we returned to Taipei for two final nights before heading on to Japan.  We were very lucky to get the chance to meet up with a friend of Mark's from Cleveland who was here visiting her family.     


Comments

  1. DadMay 15, 2024 at 5:10 AM

    Seems like you experienced a great Taiwan sampler, even without Taroko Gorge. What did you do in your last two days back in Taipei? I look forward to your Tokyo adventures.

    ReplyDelete
  2. MomMay 15, 2024 at 7:27 AM

    This is great! What a wonderfully different part of the island, and one we know nothing about, aside from Yehlu. And the US military beach where, when you were probably one. You threw sand in your eyes and were most unhappy when I held your head under a faucet, running water into your face.

    ReplyDelete
  3. MandyMay 16, 2024 at 12:22 PM

    The railroad and rope bridge are so cool! This trip sounds simply amazing!

    ReplyDelete

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