Jiufen and Jinguashi

This weekend, inspired by my just having watched A City of Sadness, I went on a day trip into Northern New Taipei City to explore the towns of Jiufen and Jinguashi. Jiufen is a town famous amongst tourists and Taiwanese people as being both the location in which a City of Sadness (a highly acclaimed Taiwanese film) was filmed and for being the town which inspired Hayao Miyazaki's depiction of the spirit world in his famous film, Spirited Away. Jiufen and Jinguashi are both towns which thrived as gold mining centres during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan in the 1930's. Eventually the gold ran out, but the town now serve as a great monument to the Japanese occupation of Taiwan due to the Japanese architecture which remains in the city.

So after a short train journey followed by and even shorter bus ride, we arrived at our first stop in Jinguashi, home to the Gold Ecological Park. This park contained both restored buildings from the time of Japanese occupation as well various museums on Taiwan's history of gold mining.

Our very first stop was a restored four posted Japanese house, providing us with a great opportunity to experience traditional Japanese architecture and design, tatami mats and all! Unsurprisingly, part of this architecture entailed me having to bend forward significantly when walking through the doorways... 

After having a look at the house, we went to have lunch at a restaurant which offered a 'miner's lunchbox', which though expensive, is fairly renowned, so we felt we had to give it a try!

The lunchbox came wrapped up in this floral cloth, and the lunchbox itself was a metal box with a miner engraved on the front. The food itself (Japanese Katsu Curry) was a little disappointing and we were initially annoyed at the high cost of the meal and left a little unsatisfied. However, after a little bit of time walking around the park, we realised that the reason for the relatively high cost of the lunchbox meal was that we were meant to have kept the lunch boxes! So we eventually returned and I managed to explain the situation to the restaurant with my broken Chinese and we left feeling a little better about the expense.

The park also had a chalet built for the Japanese crown prince in anticipation of his visit to Taiwan. Apparently the prince never actually made it to Jinguashi, but the building and its grounds were still attractive to look around.

Some paths designed to replicate the mining tracks of Jinguashi's past.

The area was filled with monuments to the town's mining past!

There was a museum on the history of gold and gold mining.

The area also had a great view of the town below, including a temple with a large golden statue on top. I did read the name of the statue, but I've forgotten it now...

The natural scenery of the park was also beautiful, and had a great view of both the mountains and the sea. Luckily for us, it was also a very warm and sunny day, with few clouds in site!

The ecological park also had a small mining tunnel which you could enter for 50 NTD.

Inside, it tried to replicate the gold mines and some lifesize figurines of miners, demonstrating the mining process.

The ecological village also had a short walk up a mountain to the remains of a Shinto Temple from the Japanese Occupation.

As you can see, the views were pretty great!

After we had our fill of Jinguashi, we then got on a quick bus journey to the neighbouring town of Jiufen. Jiufen definitely had a much more touristy feel and consisted mostly of a long hughstreet filled with Taiwanese and Japanese tourists as well as shops and stalls selling food and souvenirs.

We saw these pastries for sale at a lot of shops and designed to buy some taro (a sweet, purple potato like root vegetable which is often used in Chinese deserts) pastries and they tasted delicious!

Some of the many souvenirs on offer along the main street.

The street is also renowned for the great number of red lanterns decorating it.

Near the end of the street, we found a restaurant to have dinner at, where I had a pork belly and rice dish, along with some sweet pork buns. It turned out that these buns were chah shah bao, which were one of my favourite kinds of Chiense food before I came to Taiwan. This was the first time I'd seen them, so I was able to mark down the name of them as well as the characters, which was a big plus!

After eating, we looked around the town a little more and saw this great looking tea house.

A view of the town from above.

Just as we were about to leave, we also found this very cool museum which was filled with all sorts of bizarre and grotesque clay masks. The man there told us that they had been made by an artists over the course of the thirty years and that over 1,500 masks were on display. The museum itself just consisted of a few rooms with the masks covering every bit of available wall space. The whole thing was pretty spectacular, and it was a lot of fun looking at the individual masks, all of which had distinct features and personalities!

Finally, just before we left, I decided to try some of the taro balls which Jiufen was famous for. I managed to get a picture of them being made before the woman in the picture directed me to the sign above her which distinctly said no photographs. 

The taro balls themselves were pretty good (although not my favourite kind of desert) and came in a sort of syrupy soup over ice. When I had eaten this, and with the sun setting quickly, we decided to call it a day and promptly caught a bus heading back into the city.

Kaohsiung- Day 3

On our last day in Kaohsiung, we were very lucky to have Sunny's parent's take us on a drive and show us around the area a little! They first drove us to a town called Meinong which was a little outside of Kaohsiung and allegedly famed for its paper umbrellas (if you ever travel Taiwan, you'll soon realise that every town seems to have a certain product that it's famous for, and that if you tell anyone about a town you have been to, they will immediately ask you about said famous product). The town itself had loads of grand looking villas in a huge variety of styles, ranging from traditional to modern and European to Taiwanese. Along the drive, we also got to enjoy the wonderful views offered by the lush green mountains surrounding the area.

Not the most interesting picture, but it came with a funny story (which I can't remember perfectly and no doubt am about to butcher). Allegedly this cliff side was originally extremely shiny and smooth and prophesied a Taiwanese King (or something of the sort?). When Chang Kai Shek led the Republic of China to Taiwan as they fled the mainland, he supposedly was suspicious of this and had the rock chipped and broken away to ensure that he would remain unchallenged as leader. 

One of the more European stye houses.

A house in the Hakka style (the Hakka are an ethnic group of people in Taiwan who came from China in the 1600s), which was fairly common in this area, and which Sunny's parents' kept pointing out to us, so I decided was worth a mention in the blog!

After driving us around the town, Sunny's parents took us to this Hakka Style restaurant. The owner had some kind of connection (I think they were in-laws?) with a painter and there was a small room filled with the artist's paintings which were great to look at! Sunny's parents treated us to some delicious Hakka cuisine which was delicious, although I failed to take any pictures!

After we finished our meal of various steamed vegetables, soup, fried pork cutlets and sesame oil chicken, Sunny's parents told us they were taking us to a Daoist temple, called the Tiantaishan Monastery, which was allegedly little known by Western tourists, and less easily accessible without a car. The entrance to the temple was a huge white and gold arch, followed by a long, winding road, bordered on either side by trees which gave it the feel of driving up to some grand estate. 

The grounds of the temple were huge and covered in statues and trees.

Like all temples I have seen in Taiwan, this one was covered in artwork retelling stories from the religion.

A large container where incense sticks are burned. Incense pots are pretty common to see at temples, but this is one of the more exquisite ones I've seen!

Eliza standing with one of the temple guard statues. As you can see, they were pretty big!

The front entrance of the temple.

Gold featured prominently in the temples colour scheme and when the sun reflected off of it, it was a particularly beautiful sight to behold!

On Meinong's tourism page on the Tiantaishan Monastery, it makes reference to the a white jade Buddha Statue made from the biggest piece of white jade in Asia. I cannot attest to the authenticity of this fact, or if this is indeed said statue, but here is a white statue of Buddha nonetheless!

All the carvings on and statues in the temple carried on the white and gold colour scheme.

After leaving the Tiantaishan Monastery, we headed to the Fo Guang Shan, named for Buddha, whose name in Chinese is Fó. Fo Guang Shan is the largest Buddhist monastery in Taiwan, and contains both a monastery and the newly built Buddha Memorial Centre. Unfortunately, the monastery was closed when we went, so we were only able to see the Memorial Centre.

The lead up to the Memorial Centre, surrounded on either side by large pagodas was pretty spectacular.

The Memorial Centre itself, along with the giant 108m tall Buddha statue which sits on top. Inside the Memorial Centre were shrines used for religious purposes, various exhibits on the life of Buddha as well as some art exhibits, which we were unable to see since we were pressed for time to get back to Taipei! There was also an underground chamber which was filled with ancient historic artefacts pertaining to Buddha and Buddhism. The museum plans to open 48 of these, with one new one being opened every hundred years. They even had a closed entrance to what would be the second chamber, which had an LED timer counting down the years and days left until its opening.

The area around the centre had many pieces of art depicting stories of Buddha as well as statues, and all of these fortunately had English translations, so it was much more accessible! Unfortunately time restraints meant we couldn't fully take these in, but I'd definitely like to return some time to pay these more attention.

There was still a lot more worth seeing and exploring at Fo Guang Shan, and I think it will definitely be worth a second (and longer) visit.  However, as you can see, it had gotten pretty dark by the time we had gotten out of the Memorial Centre and we still had a bus and then train to catch back to Taipei! Fortunately a bus went directly from the station to the Kaohsiung High Speed Rail station. From here, I took my first bullet train, which travels at 182mph, back to Taipei. Although the prospect of a bullet train sounded exciting, the train itself (perhaps unsurprisingly) just felt like any other train. However, it travels at twice the speed of the regular speed train, getting us back home in just under two hours.