At 7:00 the hotel staff knocks on our door: breakfast is served on our sunny terrace in front of our holiday house. Sandwiches, tea, coffee and milk. What a life! We enjoy a peaceful breakfast before chasing butterflies and birds in the garden. Cleo and Zeno find three swings and play with a ball.
We leave at 8:45 for a hike in a true butterfly paradise, with a waterfall and a suspension bridge. If you like butterflies, we can definitely recommend Taiwan as we have seen many different giant butterflies and didn’t even visit the south of the island with the biggest concentration of them.
Next is a big Taiwanese temple complex on a by Buddhist considered sacred mountain. The Lions Head Mountain Scenic Area hosts many temples, shrines and monasteries. You can do stunning hikes to visit them all, but we only visit one, which is already a steep climb uphill. Cleo and Zeno, who does not want to be carried any longer, are determined to climb all 1000 steps up with their tiny legs. A vegan lunch is on offer at the temple, and many monks invite us to eat something, but unfortunately we just had another to-go lunch from the convenience store (tofu sushi, banana’s, raisin bread), so we let this one go. We walk through the shady jungle back down to our car and Tim and Cleo are attacked by the musquito’s. No matter where in the world we are, Olga and Zeno are always safe and Tim and Cleo are always the victim.
It’s an hour drive to the Yingge ceramics museum. We love ceramics, also because Tim’s mother makes beautiful pieces. But the museum is small and disappointing. It does a great job explaining the history and the process of making ceramics but there are not many ceramic pieces on display. Not the high we wanted to end our Taiwan trip on.
However, unfortunately it’s time to return our car, so Tim drops the family and luggage at our hotel in Taipei. The hotel personnel is a bit shocked when they see Olga enter with two children, two suitcases, a Deuter, a huge camera back, a backpack and many more bags that all somehow came out of the car. But we check in and wait in the hotel room until Tim is back from returning the car.
All went smooth and we want to celebrate it with conveyor belt sushi, which was a huge success last time we went there with the kids. But unfortunately this time only Cleo enjoys herself. The quality is simply not good and soon we decide to take our loss, pay and try to get some other food somewhere else. We stroll through a lively neighbourhood, buy some souvenirs for the neighbours that take care of our plants and mail, and get back home at 19. The children are really tired and also we go to bed in time, as we’ll fly back to Seoul tomorrow morning!
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