Last day in Alishan

Hey there,

sadly this will be our last day here in Alishan. Tomorrow we'll head back to Taipei for our last couple of days in Taiwan.

Today we allowed ourselves to sleep until 8 am, got breakfast, got a coffee at 7/11 and went on our way.
Since we already went to all the places on the tourist map of Alishan Recreation Area except Shuishan Trail and Duegaoyue Trail, we decided to do the latter. The Duegaoyue Trail is a bit further away from all other sights, whereas the Shuishan Trail (along some old railway tracks) is a bit more centrally located in the park, so we thought there might be less people on Duegaoyue. Which turned out to be true (although I can't say how many people were on Shuishan Trail, since we did not go there).

During the night, we heard that it was raining outside, but by the time we went out it was sunny again.

The trail is not as long and not as steep as the Tashan Trail we did yesterday, which was good because we were still pretty exhausted from Mt. Ta. All in all, from Alishan up Duegaoyue (2444 m above sea level) it's only about 3.5 km and about 200 height meters. Although, and this was also true for the Tashan Trail, you often go up, down again, up again, etc. So today we did about 370 positive height meters. For comparison: yesterday we did around 450 just on Tashan Trail (the rest of the day I didn't keep track with my watch).

On the top there was a Taiwanese couple equipped with gas stove who cooked a noodle soup with cabbage and other vegetables and some meat balls. Since they insisted on us having some of it we accepted gladly. It was delicious! The also let us have some of their guava and pineapple.

at the top of Duegaoyue

One thing about Taiwan I wanted to write about is the garbage collection. The garbage trucks always play a short melody when driving around, so that people bring out their trash for the truck to collect. At first we found the melody quite funny and catchy. However it can be a little annoying because you hear it all the time. Even on our hikes we sometimes could hear the melody up on the mountain...

After coming back to Alishan, we grabbed some Dango as a snack and went back to the hotel to rest a bit and write some blog entries.

For dinner we went to the food stalls and had some dumplings, noodles with sesame paste and beef stew rice. Which all were very good and only cost 240 NTD all together. So if you stay in Alishan and don't want to spent that much money on food (but also don't want to eat food from 7/11) I recommend the food stalls.

the evening sky as we walked to the restaurant area

That concludes today.
As I said tomorrow we will be going back to Taipei. But we will take the famous Forest Railway from Fenquihu to Chiayi instead of the bus this time! :)

I hope you enjoyed reading.

See you,
Pia