Jeremy KhongMy Taichung trip was a short one, with the highlight being the tour of Sun Moon Lake and visiting Feng Jia Night Market.
We had a last minute panic at Hualien because we found out the night before that ALL train tickets were sold out to Taichung, so we had to improvise and take TRA to Taipei and then pray that there are seats on the HSR from Taipei to Taichung at night. Luckily we could book the tickets online using credit card and HSR is in fact a much faster option, taking just less than an hour to reach.
We stayed at an excellent hotel, Holiday Inn Express Taichung Park Hotel. They gave us a free upgrade to a semi-suite with 2 Queen-sized beds, and was by far the most spacious and comfortable hotel room for the price we paid.
This was a godsend for us to fully recharge from the lack of sleep the previous few nights.
My mum managed to crowd-source the best taxi driver from those waiting outside our hotel to bring us on a guided day trip to Sun Moon Lake! He turned out to be a really friendly (I can’t seem to emphasise how they’re all so affable) cabby as well and he frequently brings tourists around to popular attractions.
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002713232544
Again, you may wish to contact him if you’re going to Taichung but message in Chinese only~
To be honest, I don’t really see the shape of the sun and moon…
It was quite a long ride to Sun Moon Lake (日月潭) and once we’ve reached, we got bombarded by the many boat companies trying to sell their packages to us. They look like they offer the same things, but the cabby brought us to the one near Starbucks where the staff was wearing pink shirts.
The boat company will take us to three different destinations and at each point we can disembark and roam around. When we’re done, we can board any of their company’s boat to continue on our tour.
First stop is where you can find the famous 阿嬷香菇茶叶蛋! Everyone comes here to try it, and since it’s so cheap and delicious we bought three.
The view here is slightly better once we climbed up some stairs, and I vaguely remember our second stop was more or less the same.
When the weather starts to get hot, my parents resort to all methods to keep cool.
The third stop is the most exiting place! It used to be an aboriginal village but it’s now converted to a tourist street selling lots of food and souvenirs! We tried a lot of their 土产 (local products) and also saw many cute doggies chilling.
The fried fish and shrimps were pretty good! We also tried the 大肠包小肠 (Doubled layer sausage roll)，阿桑母奶茶 (Milk tea) and other random snacks to the extent that they became our lunch.
The cab driver later brought us to 文武庙 (Wen Wu Miao) to sightsee, and 涵碧樓紀念館 (Han Bi Lou Ji Nian Guan) where ex-Taiwan President 蔣中正 (Jiang Zhong Zheng) (蒋介石 Jiang Jie Shi) stayed at during some point in time because of its tranquility. [Please correct me if I’m wrong on this]
This is a big wooden table where you can pose like a boss.
I think this is the most beautiful shot of my mum taken that day.
Followed shortly by a not-so-glamorous shot at the Winery.
After the tour, we told the cabby to drop us off at the biggest mall in Taichung, ShinKong Mitsukoshi (星光三越). This time round we realised that it was way too atas for us because everything is branded, so we scooted off to Feng Jia Night Market (逢甲夜市) instead!
This is one of the largest night markets in Taiwan and we smartly went there on a Saturday night – the crowd was NO JOKE.
We tried so much food there I stopped taking pictures of them after a while. It’s futile with the massive crowd and bad lighting, and I just wanna eat my food because it looks so good.
One particularly famous stall is the 炒面面包 (Chao Mian Mian Bao) that’s like pasta sandwich. Quite an interesting idea, but the queue was too long for me to try it out.
That’s about all I did in Taichung. As you can tell, we were pretty rushed for time mainly due to the travelling distance between the places we visited. We didn’t think it would take that long to get around even by car and were pretty shagged out by the end of the day .
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Contributed by Jeremy’s Blog.
