Maokong

Hey there,

later this evening (at 16:25 h) we wanted to catch our previously reserved train (TRA train, one of the faster ones) to Hualien.

So first we checked out of our hotel, but left our big bags there.

Since we could not book a train for our journey back from Chaiyi to Taipei in two weeks we first went to Taipei Main Station to go to a ticket office there and hopefully get some train tickets.

There we noticed that TRA and the high-speed train HSR apparently are two different companies, or they only sell the tickets separately (?). So we went to a HSR ticket office and bought our tickets for the journey with the high-speed rail. It's much faster (2 h instead of 4), but also costs more (1000 NTD instead of 500-600 for the faster trains of the TRA). Even so it is much cheaper than a train in Germany...

For the remaining hours that we had in Taipei we went to go up Maokong mountain using the gondola. In order to get to the gondola you just take the MRT to Taipei Zoo and walk a few meters to the gondola station. One way costs 150 NTD. The ride itself takes roughly 30 min. There are multiple stations where you can get off, but we wanted to visit the sights at the last station first.

Maokong is famous for it's tea. You can see many plantations there.

View from the gondola

Tea ice cream with cat cookies. Maokong means cat hole, so you will see many cat symbols there.

women collecting tea

  

 

 

 

Since we also wanted to visit the temples located at the next gondola station we also went there. It costs slightly more, since you have to pay 70 NTD for a ride of one station and then pay 100 NTD from there to the bottom. But the temples are beautiful (although one was unfortunately under construction) and it's worth the extra 20 NTD.

 

 

 

 

 

We were running late however and we knew the gondola and MRT ride would take more or less an hour to our hotel and from there we needed to go to Taipei Main Station to catch the train. So we hurried back as fast as we could. No easy task with the heat going on...

For the ride from the hotel to the train station we opted for a taxi instead of the MRT. The ride was more or less 2.5 km long at cost about 130 NTD. It is quite cheap to ride taxi here.

When we arrived in Taipei Main Station we still had a little time to grab something small to eat and went to our train.

The train was really clean and spacious and was going quite fast at times (140 km/h when we checked).

View from the train

After arriving in Hualien (about 2 hours 20 min later) we checked into our very nice hotel (the Archinn) and just wandered around the neighborhood a bit to grab something small to eat.

That was it for this day.

See you tomorrow! :)

Pia