After Tims morning photo session to capture the beautiful scenic views of Sun Moon Lake, with it’s morning fog and the surrounding mountains in 50 shades of grey, we leave our hotel at 7:00 to rent a bike across the road at the Giant Centre to cycle around the lake, the largest body of water in Taiwan with a circumference of 29 KM, a beautiful alpine lake.
We won’t do the full circle, but we will return after 8KM to be back within two hours and have time for the rest of our programme of the day.
It’s great to be outside so early, before the heath and the crowds, have the children locked in their children seats, and spot herons, butterflies, jumping fish, other birds, and even hear some monkeys. The bicycle road is excellent, with stunning views over the lake.
We enjoy it so much, that we even consider to just continue when we arrive at the point where we were instructed to return. But we follow our rationale, follow the instructions and return as promised.
As we have 20 spare minutes when we arrive back in town, we buy some breakfast at the convenience store and enjoy a morning pick-nick at a bench next to the lake in the shade. What a perfect morning!
After returning the bicycles, we pack our bags and get back in the car for a two and a half hours drive to Daxueshan National Forest. A three kilometre high mountain, famous for its 1400 year old cypress, spring blooms, bears, birds and butterflies, and its year-round 12 degrees celsius which sounds tempting as today is another sunny and hot day.
We arrived at the park at 13:00, already hungry. Luckily the restaurant is open, serving a lunch buffet which is perfect for us, who still try to eat vegan, and the kids. Tim is -as always – finished eating when the rest of the family takes their second bite. He goes out with his mega zoom lens, approximately 2,5kg, it stays mostly in the car as it’s impossible to shoot anything else than animals. He first spots a Pallas’s squirrel who chases another one around the trees. Then his eyes catch something moving in the flower bed, a Formosan sambar deer.
We continue driving to the top of the park, luckily without any land slides today. The top of the mountain is in the clouds, but they are moving and sometimes there is some sun too, very welcome at 12 degrees. We go for a short stroll around the highest alpine lake of Taiwan, and although Tim has a noisy family joining him on his continuous quest to shoot animals (only with a camera!), he’s lucky again with another deer and some birds and squirrels.
Although you can do many, many hikes in this park, and we did not even see the 1400 year old cypress (which is a 6KM hike), we must continue our drive. It’s already 15.30 and we still have a 2,5H drive to our hotel ahead of us. Luckily the children sleep 1,5H, and the drive proceeds smoothly until we arrive at the tiny village in the middle of nowhere jungle. We enter the wrong property and an elderly man without teeth explains to us in his best Chinese that we must continue on the road. Some meters further, we indeed recognise the holiday homes from the Booking.com pictures. It’s a big piece of land, with 8 tiny houses.
As it’s 18:00 and it’s clear that there is no dinner within walking distance, we unfortunately must leave the idyllic place in the Taiwanese jungle straight away for a village 15 minutes down the road where Google says restaurants are still open.
The restaurants turn out to be food stalls. Tim is convinced by a busy stall selling bami, so Olga stands in line to order a serving. As Olga already had to go through three food poisonings this holiday, she does not dare to eat any more street food. So Tim goes to the supermarket to buy something for Olga.
We eat the food in our holiday home and don’t dare to leave the house because of all mosquitoes, so we go to sleep together at 20:30.
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