Sun Moon Lake

My flatmate Nic and I made a trip to Sun Moon Lake this weekend. Admittedly, we began planning a little late, that is to say: a week and a half before our departure (a feat of brinksmanship whose success apparently surprised Nic’s teacher). Reserving accommodation did not pose a major problem, and there were many hotels to choose from. We chose the one closest to the bus stop. Booking train tickets, however, was an entirely different story. A week and a half before our departure date, almost all High Speed Railway trains to Taichung were fully booked, and the few that remained departed either early in the afternoon (before the end of my classes) or very late in the evening (with an arrival time too late to catch the shuttle to Sun Moon Lake). The Sunday return ticket situation looked even more dire: There were no free spots between noon and ten in the evening.

Fretting over the matter while trying to talk sense into one of those stupid multi-purpose machines at 7-Eleven and texting Nic to ask for his opinion, I eventually managed to find some tickets through regular rail (i.e. the Taiwanese Railway Authority). We were to leave Taipei at 15:00 on Friday and board the train back at 11:45 on Sunday. The shuttle tickets were, for reasons not entirely clear to me even after calling the bus company, impossible to book for the times we needed, so we simply left the matter in the hands of the powers that be.

However, despite the somewhat hectic process of purchasing tickets, the whole trip went remarkably smoothly, to the point that it sometimes aroused my suspicions. It took us a little over two hours to get to Taichung, where we boarded the shuttle bus to Sun Moon Lake. Finding the station was a bit of a challenge, since there was no indication online of its location, but the information office sent us in the right direction and even gave us a map of Taichung’s city centre (who knew that the bus station would be ten minutes away!).

My worries that there would be hordes of people waiting for the shuttle bus turned out to have been unnecessary. Including the two of us, only five or six people boarded the empty bus at the Taichung train station. I was thankful that we did not manage to purchase HSR tickets, though, for the bus filled up once we got to the HSR station, and there were still people left waiting on the platform. We got to Sun Moon Lake after nightfall, checked-in, had dinner, and went to bed.

We got up a little before six the following day to go pick up our rental bikes, which we had reserved online a few days earlier. The ride, though occasionally a little steep, was very pleasant, especially when I remembered how much cooler and fresher the air was than in Taipei. The first notable thing we saw on the way was a collection of tiny floating islands by the shore, which – so we were told the next day by an information board – were built by the local Thao tribe as artificial breeding grounds for fish and shrimp, as well as a way to impede waves from eroding the shore.

We stopped by Wenwu Temple – a rather large temple on the top of our first hill, featuring, among others, a replica of the mace of Guan Yu from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms – after which we ate breakfast at a little roadside kitchen. Our next stop was another temple on a hill, named Xuanzang Temple after the monk from Journey to the West. In its neighbourhood we also visited Ci’En Pagoda, which I climbed for its view of the lake. The rest of our ride around the lake was relatively peaceful, except for an accidental detour that I only noticed after several kilometres of a suspiciously pleasant and long descent. Regaining our altitude was not fun.

After returning, we ate lunch and made a short hike up Maolan Mountain Trail. The weather started to turn ugly, though, and we hid in a café just before a strong downpour later in the afternoon. I made progress on Bocaccio’s Decameron.

The next day, we walked around the lake for a while before catching a bus back to Taichung. Once again, the plan went off without a hitch, so we made it back to Taipei in time for my weekly family call.