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.