Yehliu

Yehliu

 野柳

The weekend before last, my friend and I went to a place known as Yehliu Geopark, a small area in Taiwan known for its very unusual, otherworldly rock formations. Yehliu is on the coast just North of Taipei and is easily reachable within an hour and a bit from the centre of Taipei. 

The surface of Yehliu resembles that of another planet, with large, oddly shaped rocks of all shapes rising out of the smooth, rolling ground. You can imagine that if the area were a little bigger, it would be a prime location for filming science fiction movies.

When living in Taiwan, it quickly becomes apparent that people like to queue here for popular attractions, be it famous restaurants and night market stands or the Jade Cabbage and Meat Shaped Stone in the National Palace Museum. Yehliu Geopark is no exception, boasting its most famous stone which is known as 'The Queen's Head'. The Queen's Head is said to resemble the head of a queen wearing a crown, and admittedly does, at the right angle, remind me of the bust of Queen Nefertiti.

This particular rock can be seen on many of the advertisements for the park, and attracts long queues of people who want to take a picture of the rock. We decided not to wait in line, but I did manage to snap a picture which was mostly devoid of people (although admittedly not at the rock's best angle). It was definitely a cool rock, but probably not worthy of all the attention it gets.

The Queen's Head

The park also had numerous fossils of flowers scattered around, which were fun to keep an eye out for!

The park also had a small path up a hilly peninsula which we decided to take.

The path was through some pretty lush greenery and pretty flowers.

A view of the park from above.

The path was fairly straightforward, but gave some pretty nice views of the ocean and the surrounding area. After about twenty minutes of walking, the sweltering heat was becoming unbearable but fortunately the path ended at the end of the peninsula which, due to its placement on the side of a cliff, treated us to very heavy winds that quickly cooled us down. A sort of natural air conditioning.

After enjoying the breeze and cooling down a little, we headed back to the rock area of the park for a few more pictures.

The rocks emerging out of the ocean. The water in the area was crystal clear!

My friend Franzi posing with a rock.

I think this rock is known as the 'Candle', but please don't quote me on that...

As you can see, the rocks could provide a perfect location in films for bizarre aliens to emerge from behind rocks and ambush the film's heroes.

Taoyuan Farm

With all of the K3 classes at my school nearing their graduation, some of the Taiwanese teachers have organised field trips outside of school time for all the kids and their families to go on together. For one of my classes, K3D, my co-teacher invited me along to join them on a full day at a farm and activity centre in Taoyuan, a city just outside of Taipei.

I thought I'd give a quick overview of our day to show some pictures of my students and also the interesting cultural experience I got to have!

The day started with us preparing for a barbecue (if that's the word? My Taiwanese teacher and I both had some difficult thinking of what English word would be used). I didn't get a chance to see how the whole process worked, but basically we built large charcoal towers under which a fire was lit. While the fire was being tended to, we prepared the sweet potatoes and eggs which were going to be cooked by wrapping the sweet potatoes in newspaper and the eggs in a thick red clay. I don't quite understand what happened next, but I guess it involved the whole fire pit area being covered with some kind of kindling which would cook around it. More on this later!

A bucket full of clay covered eggs.

It was pretty messy!

After preparing for our meal, the kids played a little in this semi-maze made out of crops.

We then headed to this little area full of water pumps which shot out huge streams of water and resulted in a water fight which left everybody soaking wet...

We headed into a small wooden shelter filled with tables where we had some more food preparation! 

First, we made an all natural jelly (a lot of Taiwanese drinks have a fruity juice with small cubes of jelly inside) which involved squeezing a mesh bag filled with some kind of seed in a bucket of water repeatedly before the buckets were taken away from us...

After that, much to the delight of the kids, we then made mochi! Mochi is a popular Japanese desert which consists of glutinous rice paste filled or covered with sesame, peanut, red bean or something similar. Each table was given a wooden bowl filled with glutinous rice which we mashed until it was all a smooth (and very sticky) kind of dough.

We then scooped out chunks of this rice dough and rolled it into balls before rolling it around in peanut powder and Macha Tea Powder and eating them.

After eating our fill of mochi, we headed outside to a play area which was full of different circus-y games, such as stilt walking (see above), a game which involved rolling a large metal circle with a big metal hook and some big wooden shoes attached to string which you had to walk around with. I managed to master the stilts to the extent that I could briefly run for about three or four seconds before falling off.

After that we went fishing for shrimp in the ponds outside the farm. We all had little sticks with a small piece of dried fish (or something equally potent) attached via a string. After a short period of waiting, I got a bite, but the shrimp kept letting go after it emerged out of the water. After three failed attempts (each only separated by about 20 seconds or so-shrimps apparently aren't particularly smart), I finally managed to get my shrimp all the way out of the water and into my bucket! After some short deliberation, one of my kids decided to call it 'Dragon'.

Dragon in all his/her glory.

Some of my kids with Dragon!

After we finished our fishing, we were brought back to the place we had started where we prepared the eggs and sweet potatoes were cooking. We were greeted with a huge pile of smoking ash (like I said, I missed the step of what this ash originally was), and the parents quickly got to work of shovelling through the ash to find the clay baked eggs and sweet potato. The eggs had the clay washed off and all the food was gathered on trays. It also turned out that we had been cooking chicken in these barbecues as big metallic bags marked with the character 雞 (chicken) were also pulled out from the charcoal.

We went back to the wooden hut with the tables and were served a feast of sweet potatoes, baked eggs, chicken roasted in a Chinese medicinal herb sauce (really delicious!) and the natural jelly drink we'd made earlier. The food was all great, although I forgot to take a picture of any of it!

Our feast marked the end of the day, so we all gathered for one big group picture (followed by about ten more individual pictures with different kids, their Taiwanese teacher and me).

All in all, it was a pretty fun day out!

Shifen and Pingxi

Pingxi

平溪

My friend Catriona recently visited me in Taipei and while she was here we decided to take advantage of my weekend and go on a day trip out of the city. There are still a number of day trips I'd wanted to do out of the city, and after mentioning the Pingxi district and it's famous floating lanterns to Catriona, the decision of where we would go was immediately made.

Pingxi is located to the east of Taipei and easily accessible within an hour or two by taking two train journeys. The journey itself was, in theory, easy enough but we managed to add a little chaos by completely misunderstanding a man working at the station, and waiting for the wrong time train at the wrong part part of the platform until he hurriedly came and directed us to our train which was at the platform and about to depart. So after a quick sprint followed by one very crowded train journey and a second slightly less crowded one, we were in our first destination of the day, a village called Shifen located in Pingxi county.

Pingxi is famous for its lanterns and especially its lantern festival at the end of Chinese New Year which attracts thousands of people who release an equally large number of lanterns into the sky in what seems to be quite a spectacle. However, lanterns play a key role in Pingxi's tourism on every day of the year and many tourists flock to the area to buy lanterns, paint their wishes onto them and release them in the sky.

However, if the magic of the lanterns isn't enough, you also have the option of buying these pieces of bamboo which decorate the paths around the town and which also provide a canvas for people's wishes.

For the time being, the lanterns would have to wait. The town of Shifen is also home to a locally famous waterfall, and this was our first destination.

The town itself was located in the mountains and was accordingly surrounded by lush trees and greenery, as is typical for much of the island.

After a short walk along the road and a short lunch stop, we reached the waterfall scenic area. The waterfall itself was spectacularly beautiful...

And also provided an excellent photo-op.

Eliza, Catriona and Me.

A view of the waterfall from above.

After seeing our fill of nature we headed back to the town which itself was very picturesque. The main street is divided in two by the train track which passes through it.

Although the semi regular trains don't stop hordes of people from walking along the tracks and propping up their lanterns on them while they paint their messages and wishes. The whole of the main street was filled with stores selling lanterns and people setting them off wherever you looked.

When you looked up at the sky, you could see lanterns floating away in every direction!

After Shifen, we hopped back on the train to head to our second destination, Pingxi station.

Pingxi had some pretty pedestrian streets and we treated ourselves here to some Tang Yuan (glutinous rice and sesame balls in a sweet soup-in this instance, unfortunately there was a rubbery cabbage in the soup as well which made the dish a little strange) and Zhua Bing (flaky scallion pancakes).

Some lantern mosaics.

After walking around the town a little, we settled on a little lantern shop where we would buy and decorate our lantern. The lanterns were huge and pegged to metal frames, with four separate sides that needed to be filled. We got to work with our markers, writing fragments of Chinese, but with little reference to what wishes we wanted to come true with the release of our lantern.

Eliza and Catriona, and the shopkeeper (one of the coolest Taiwanese old ladies I've seen so far) posing with the final product.

The shopkeeper got to work and fitted our lantern with kindling for the fire which would lift it into the sky.

Catriona + Sam 愛台灣＋平溪

Some more obligatory poses after our lantern was lit...

The lantern is released...

And off it goes!

Finally, before heading home, we decided to make one last stop and headed to a Gua Bao stand we'd passed earlier. Gua Bao is made from a steamed bun, pork belly, coriander, pickled vegetables and peanut powder and was Catriona's favourite dish of everything she tried while she was here (and is definitely one of my all time favourites too!)

With the sun setting, feeling pretty tired, we headed back to the train station to begin our journey back to Taipei.