Yangmingshan and Jiufen

This Saturday, I, along with several friends, made a trip to Yangmingshan National Park and the town of Jiufen. I had originally intended to visit Yangmingshan only to see the calla lilies, which at this time of the year are in full bloom, but it turned out that everyone had their own plans for what they wanted to see, and so the entire trip became much longer, and rather more interesting, than I had anticipated.

Our first stop – which we reached by the Yangmingshan tourist bus from the visitor centre – was Bamboo Lake. It is at Bamboo Lake, or Zhuzi Hu, where the calla lilies are grown, the area itself being a conglomeration of small farms with watery patches from which the flowers emerge. We wandered about for a bit, entering every now and then the occasional open farm, after which we caught the bus to another part of Yangmingshan: Xiaoyoukeng.

Xiaoyoukeng, or “Small oil hole” is a mountainside with several fumaroles: openings in the very surface of the volcano which constantly emit hot air. The gas – as we could ascertain from the pungent smell wafting through the air – was Sulphur, and it was being released not only from the fumaroles, but also from bubbling puddles along the tourist path. There was not much else to see, and so we soon began our hike up the Qixing (or Seven Star) Mountain, the tallest peak in Taipei.

The trek was not a particularly pleasant one, for it was rather warm, and smog seemed to be covering much of Taipei, ruining the view from the top. Nevertheless, the weather conditions were deemed worthy that day by hundreds of other hikers, who formed particularly formidable throngs on both peaks of the mountain. Against my protests, we joined a fifteen-minute queue to take a picture with the sign at the top of the taller peak.

Our trek brought us to the other side of the mountain. Zach, who comes from Iowa, could not refrain from likening the occasional bamboo groves to corn fields, and once or twice ran off into one of the many overgrown paths on the way. We intended to catch a bus to another destination at Yangmingshan, but we took the wrong bus, and ended up heading back to Taipei. After the exhausting hike, nobody insisted on disembarking.

The day, however, was not over yet. Our last destination was Jiufen, a quaint town built into the mountain above a picturesque bay, famous worldwide for inspiring the movie “Spirited Away.” I got much less from the visit than everyone else, as I only saw about ten minutes of the film. The prime mover of the movie – parents who turn into pigs because of their insatiable greed and are kidnapped by the town’s spirits – seemed to me far too scary, as did the various creepy characters inhabiting the colourful but threatening world.