The first three days of visitations in our Taiwan trip have been, for the most part, kid-centric: including places like Carton King, strawberry and grape picking, Miyahara Ice-Cream, Rainbow Village and Shengxing Station. As we moved to the second quarter of the trip, the places we are checking out also become more scenic. And the first two of these two major spots were on Day 04 – Xitou Nature Education Area in the morning, and Sun Moon Lake in the afternoon.
The Xitou Nature Education Area is one of the most popular national parks in the country, and the hundreds of visitors we saw already at the place when we arrived at 9:30am pretty much proved that. Interestingly, the vast majority of visitors this Monday morning were the elderly, and from their attires, locals I think – and who were intent on hiking the trails in this beautiful forest maintained by the National University of Taiwan. We also saw an almost strange scene: hundreds of the elderly hikers gathering in one part of the forest stretching to music, before they actually began the hike. Got to stretch those muscles first before they get a good 3-4 hour workout!
There were very few children about though, something I found odd – and initially concluded that perhaps this park just isn’t the kind of place that appeals to kids. Towards the end of our stay in the park when we were on our way down, we bumped into an elderly pair who called out Peter and Hannah and kindly queried how come they weren’t in school today. That was when we realized that the reason why there are so few children about is because it’s still a normal school day for Taiwanese kids this Monday of a mid-December week. We explained that we were 外国人 (‘foreigners’, Matt!) and from Singapore.
The park is indeed beautiful, and we had a wonderfully cool day to trek through it too – though skies weren’t quite getting the sea blue we’ve yet to see in our trip so far. It didn’t take long for us to realize though that we made a mistake in how much time we’d planned to set aside for Xitou. The trails that lead to the skywalk observatory and bamboo forest cannot be completed in a few hours: and two hours was all we had to stay in the park. So, in short, I never got to achieve one of the key reasons for me to have included this place in our itinerary – a visit to the much talked about Bamboo Forest.
Thankfully, there was a smaller Bamboo Arboretum on the other side of the park, and we made do with that. The little area has different varieties, judging from the markings we saw. It’s not nearly as expansive as the Bamboo Forest, but oh well. If we ever come by here again, we’d certainly want to make doubly sure this time that we set aside the required period of time to do a full hike through the park.
Oh yes; there’s an admission charge that I thought was fairly hefty for a national park: NTD160/SGD7 for adults, and NTD80/SGD3.50 for children. Peter was judged too young still to even need a children ticket, so we saved that tiny bit off him.
Pictures! The Sony 16-35mm f4 was the main camera for this visit, so there are some of the expected distortions from the wide-angles used.
Next stop: Sun Moon Lake!
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