Taiwan Visit Day 4

The night we spent in Kaohsiung, we stayed in the Splendor Kaohsiung, a hotel located in the tallest building in Kaohsiung, 2nd tallest in Taiwan. It's called the 85 Sky Tower because well, it has 85 floors. Our hotel room was on the 63rd floor and in the morning we went up to the observation deck on the 75th floor. Here's a photo from the deck of Kaohsiung city.

In the morning we visited a famous monastery in Taiwan, Foguangshan ( 佛光山). It covers a huge area in Kaohsiung, here i am posing with the renowned Great Buddha Land in one of the gardens.

We took about 30-40 minutes to walk to this Main Shrine....yes it's that big inside there! There is even a university in this monastery and a hostel as well.

The Buddha sitting inside the Main Shrine

This is the Five Hundred Arhats Garden, i believe there are 500 statues surrounding this square, part of them behind me in this photo. Actually the purpose of this photo was to capture the 3 mottos promoted by Foguangshan to achieve enlightenment. It's a simple 3-step method : Do good things, Speak good words and Think good thoughts.

This is the Five Cents Driftwood, a famous restaurant in Taiwan. Not famous for its food, but for its architectural designs. I believe there are 4-5 branches in Taiwan, but we went to the first flagship shop near Tainan.

The shop is built using trees as its structure, and consists of mostly recycled materials like planks and seashells. The toilets gained a lot of attention as well, with its wooden doors and the Easter Island statues for a tap, where u turn on the water outlet, and water gushes out from the statues' mouths....haha...

After lunch, we headed to 安平區 near Tainan. We walked at the old street for finger foods and followed by this visit to Fort Zeelandia (安平古堡), the only standing Western-style castle in Taiwan.

We had an early day...checking into our hotel for the night...a recreational farm in the rural areas of Tainan. After checking in, we went hiking in the small hill behind the farm, looking at the vegetables and fruit trees, also trying out the flying fox chair up on the hill and finally going up the observation deck at around 200-300 m high.

At the farm, there was also a spa in the garden plus a hot spring....but after having prior experiences in Japan and Korea, i decided to give it a miss. Ohhh...there were also free roaming pigs and chickens in this farm. At night, when we lit up the fire crackers, the chickens were scared silly they almost ran out of the farm!

The owners of the farm cooked us a home-cooked meal in the dining hall. Later they also thought us how to make animal shape using leaves. Here's my giraffe!

Gastronomical Tour of Taiwan Part III

Our meal in Hualien was the first proper meal we had since touching down in Taiwan, and a hearty one too! We had Chinese dinner...beginning with small bowls of cold dishes...

This is crab rice, which tasted somewhat like pumpkin rice....didn't like this personally..

This is Taiwan's favourite i suppose, the 3-layer meat.... there is even a rock in the National Palace Museum in Taipei that resembles this type of 3-layer meat...uncanny but true!

The Taiwanese also love this kind of soupy dishes. I wouldn't call it soup, but it doesn't look like gravy either. It's not salty so it's fine to drink it from your bowl...and goes really well with white rice.

This is the Milk Hotpot we had from JJ Farm near Hualien.... you either like it or you hate it...i really like the rich milky taste, but Kenny doesn't like it at all...

Some vegetables, mushrooms, beehoon and other stuff to be added to the hotpot. I must give it to the Taiwanese though, their food are always very fresh.

And their rice is more similar to Japanese pearl rice, than the dry, coarse type we normally have here.

Here we go....a big meal. I was so full, i almost slept the entire journey to Kaohsiung!

Taiwan Visit Day 3

This is the streets of Hualien, from my hotel room. Hualien is a small town in which local Taiwanese likes to go for short getaways. The pace of life here is slower than the other cities, and its town has the largest percentage of aborigines in Taiwan.

In Hualien lies the Buddhist Tzu Chi University and General Hospital. My mom, best friend and boss are three active volunteers with the Tzu Chi Association. This pic is taken for them =)

We stopped in a cow farm in the outskirts of Hualien, to feed some ponies and goats and also to taste their Milk Hotpot, which is brewed from the cow milk obtained from the cows in this recreational farm.

In the afternoon, we made our way to the south of Taiwan. Eventhough Taiwan is a small island, the country is divided by Earth's Tropic of Cancer, hence giving rise to 2 types of weather condition in the country. The North having a more pronounced 4-season climate while the south enjoys fairly tropical weather. On the way to Kaohsiung, we had to cut through many mountains, and our bus was running very close to the cliffs on the shoreline.

That night, i had a very good time in Kaohsiung's 六合夜市. This night market is absolutely brimming with life. There were many visitors bringing their dogs out for night walks and i spotted this stall selling clothes for dog, complete with the owner's Miniature Schnauzer as model.

Here's another shop selling mini pigs! This kind of pigs are really friendly and they don't grow really big, very ideal to keep as a pet there. Over here though, it's haram haha....

After that, i visited Dream Mall, the largest shopping center in Taiwan which has a huge Hello Kitty Ferris Wheel atop its building.

I went for a ride in the Ferris Wheel. Each carriage comes in different cartoon designs and in the carriage there is a soft toy to accompany your 20-minute ride.

This is the interior of Dream Mall, approaching its closing hour. It was a Friday night, but shopping was breezy. I love how shopping centers in Taiwan are not as congested as in Singapore or Kuala Lumpur, makes the experience much more worthwhile.

Gastronomical Tour of Taiwan Part II

The day in Jiufen was spent in a fruitful manner, with us stuffing ourselves silly. This is my taro ball soup (芋圓), which is Jiufen's specialty.

There are a mixture of taro balls, sweet potato balls, and other stuff like red bean and mung beans cooked together to form a rich dessert. The balls are all gooey and sticky, or as the Taiwanese call it, very 'Q'.

Apparently, the lady owner of this stall is pretty famous, although i don't see her around. She had gazillions photos of herself pasted on the walls of her shop. One thing though, the people of Taiwan provide really good service, they always greet you with a smile and chat with you and are ready to help. This lady at the stall helped me chose five of her best-selling types of fishball to make me a bowl of her famous 5-flavoured fish ball soup (五味綜合魚丸湯).

Here's the picture of the soup, one more fish ball is actually well-hidden underneath. The fishballs are all huge, one ball probably takes about 5-6 bites to finish. Their fishballs are very full of flavour and is made up of mostly fish.... those mass produced fishballs i normally have at home, i suspect, may not contain fish in them anymore =(

This is some sort of snails i saw slowly roasting on the grill.... it looked so good i had to try a little....

Here it is, the lady pulls the meat out of the shell and cuts it up into bite sizes before adding a spicy sauce.... so yummy!

Ahh, and this is beef noodles... another of Taiwan's most famous food...

Taiwan Visit Day 2

2nd day must be my favourite of the lot. We had a lot of scenic excursions, starting with our bus trip along the northeast coast of Taiwan. Taiwan is an island with mountain regions in its center, hence most of the roads are built close to the coast, providing majestic sights.

My first stop was at Yehliu Geopark (野柳). Natural erosions by the wind and water left many fascinating rock formations along this beach. Here i am posing with the 'mushroom-shaped' ones. My biggest regret of the day was not taking snapshots of the 'candle-wax' ones cos i wasn't able to locate them, but they sure look good from the brochure!

These are the ginger-shaped ones. They really look like real gigantic ginger, even the colour and texture are alike! The red line was drawn to prevent overly eager tourists from falling over the cliff. The waves from the beach was pretty.... it was slamming on the rocks just below, creating jets up along the cliff.

And the most symbolic rock in Yehliu....the Mother of all rocks here...haha....the Queen's head (女王頭). It was predicted that the neck will no longer hold and sometime in the future, the Queen will lose her head. It is still being debated whether they would want to eternally preserve it by artificial means or let nature take its course.

Look! I found my missing slipper along the shore ! Nah, it's another rock formation called the Fairy's Shoes ( 仙女鞋). Looks eeriely like mine huh?

A huge hippo ?

This is Jiufen Township (九份), my favourite town in Taiwan. It was originally a gold mining town. After all the gold had been dug up, the people left and it became a ghost town until several years ago, director Hou Hsiao Hsien made a touching movie with the town as its backdrop. The locals and tourists returned, making the town prosper again. The town of Jiufen is high up on a hill, and the sleepy and lazy town has a unique charm to it.

There were only several small streets up there, with this one being the busiest one. The streets were small and cosy, and it's a slow uphill climb but you don't feel the slope because you're just too busy soaking in the atmosphere.

The quieter area of Jiufen.

After having lunch, we took a public bus to the nearest train station ( down from the hill). We took a scenic coastal train ride all the way to Hualien. We crossed endless rivers and went through countless tunnels with a matching seaview...nice! Pity it was insanely cold in the train...

Another pity i visited the Taroko Gorge (太魯閣國家公園) right after a typhoon. The originally blue river had turned all muddy....really really disappointed because the Taroko Gorge is the MAIN natural attraction in Taiwan...the number 1 on the must-see list when going to nature attractions in this country. The weather in Hualien was cloudy, so the photos just turned out depressing.

Gastronomical Tour of Taiwan Part I

It was a different gastronomical world in Taiwan. The food in this little island is very much different from our food this side of the shore. Let's start with the airplane food. The food is pretty much what you get with other airlines. NO touch whatsoever of anything Chinese in it. I recall when i took JAL, the meals were nicely decorated in the Japanese way and they served Japanese food as well.

The drinks in the convenience stores are entirely different. They put alot of emphasis on the outer looks, and all drinks came packaged in attractive boxes, like this pack of Rose Tea. Some other brands of fruit juices even came with celebrities' pictures...those that i could find were Leehom, SHE, Fahrenheit, Rainie etc.

Ahhh...i love this coffee...i like the idea where the coffee here are packaged in cups which you can either remove the cover and foil and drink or you could poke a straw into the tiny hole and sip it slowly. I had this almost everyday...and it was really cheap too! To the tune of about SGD1 per cup.

SMELLY TOFU! Tastes like SHIT, Smells like SHIT, i swore on the spot i'll never try this ever again. Funny though, on The Amazing Race Asia last week, when they stopped over in Taiwan, the smelly tofu they had were those in broth...but this was the only kind i encountered.


This is a stall selling A-Gei . Even though i was at numerous food streets in Taiwan, the special thing was that all different areas in Taiwan specialises in different kind of snacks...so it wasn't that bad combing one after another...in Danshui Old Street, the 2 specialties were A-Gei 阿給and Grandma's Tiedan 阿婆鐵蛋. In A-Gei's case, i don't see it anywhere else but here. As for tiedan, i hated it when friends brought it back previously so i didn't attempt to try at all.

A-Gei (阿給) are deep fried tofus that have been stuff with flavoured crystal noodles and sealed with fish paste (surimi). It is served with a spicy sauce. It was OK, but it didn't taste like anything Singaporeans/Malaysians are familiar with.

The street was also lined with stalls selling Candy-coated fruits. I tried the bunch of tomatoes. The outer layer of rock candy was supremely sweet, the first bite almost broke my teeth...but thank goodness the tomatoes were very juicy and bordered on the sour side. Altogether, Taiwanese snacks are really plentiful and the food are of much higher quality as compared to here. More to come in Part II....