21 May 2023
All the tea in the Republic of China
Maokong trail from Taipei zoo station
The last hike is completed. More of a long walk between various tourist areas via concrete steps and roads than an actual hike. About 16km station to station, nearly 5 hours, but that included a few wrong turns.
The Maokong trail is section 7 of the Taipei grand trail. I think I ended up doing most of this, or most of the actual good bits that are not walking along a road. I certainly did all the bits in Yangmingshan national park, which is where all the main peaks on the trail are, plus I did the 4 beasts walk (by accident) and now the Maokong trail.
As you shall barely see, Maokong is all about tea. There are cable cars to haul you up into the tea plantations, and lots of people come to do just that. All of them were glaring at me because I was completely drenched with sweat.
I must also mention, no rain, at all! I expected another downpour. So I think that makes 1 actual day of rain on this trip, although yesterday I changed my plan due to rain, there was no actual rain while I was at the zoo. I predicted there would be 10 days of rain out of 28, so I was lucky (again, Korea was the same), and the drought is real.
Back to today's hike. The views were not great due to a combo of weather and pollution, the trail was overly developed (a feature of trails in Taiwan), but the the actual scenery on the trail such as temples, tea houses, farms, rock features formed by ancient cats, was all quite interesting.
The 'hike' started at the Taipei zoo station, same place I was at yesterday, where I was greeted by this statue of a girl suckling a lamb / goat / pony (or are they suckling her?). I have seen these in many countries.
This is the bottom gondola station. I think I called it a cable car above, or is it a ropeway? It is not a funicular railway.
I made a stop here because of their awesome sign.
This is where the stairs start. There are 1000 stairs to the first temple, they are numbered periodically.
Staircase with flags. Very Auspicious. Apparently today a Taiwanese guy won a Taekwondo event in Korea and then decided to be presented with his medal while holding the flag of China, it is big news here, and presumably on the mainland. I just thought I'd throw that in.
What sort of a temple is this? Pentagrams instead of swastika's.
A really great staircase up to this temple, must be good.
At first I was a bit disappointed, sure there is a nice bridge there, but I expected a huge complex, although those stairs going up the hill seem to go nowhere, maybe I will follow them.
Ahh, here we are then, or are we? It is part of Zhinan temple.
It has a nice view, even if it is a polluted grey day.
I actually went back down the stairs, then read the internet that said to go through the temple to continue my journey. Out the back of the bit of the temple shown above, I arrived here. More bigger temple in the distance, lets go.
The main part of Zhinan temple. I keep typing Zhipai which is a pack of cards.
The next stop of the gondola is just past the top of the temple, following the path with all the gold bits of cardboard you pay for to hang in a tree. BTW, today's temple had a sign saying it was the centre of Chinese Taoist culture. So no Buddha.
Crap pic, but instead of riding the gondola, I will walk down, and back up again to the station across the valley there.
The path down was this horrible style, where they construct a stair case, and all the material between stairs washes away or gets compressed, so you trip over the stair with every step. Useless.
A rather ordinary gondola shot from nearer the bottom of the valley. No rain at all!
OK, this little spot here is the entire reason Maokong is called Maokong. The little holes in the rocks in this spot were believed to be made by an ancient giant cat.
Giant cat statues guard the bridge to the area.
Almost at the top gondola station now, and it is a very developed area full of tea houses and cafe's.
I couldn't get me and the gondola in the same shot, but here is my giant sweaty head. People were staying well away from me.
Behold, the upper gondola station.
The 'trail' down from this point goes through a few garden areas like this, with both plastic and stone statues of various things to have your photo taken with. Still no tea to be seen though (in my pictures at least), I had already passed the tea museum.
OK, here is some tea.
Not a great pic, but I left it in as you can see Taipei 101 over on the right.
After wandering through some touristy fields of tea and various other things, I rejoined a 'trail', one last chance to slip over on some moss covered stone?
But wait it gets mossier! But thankfully I did not fall over. All hiking complete, time to clean my shoes with a toothbrush to keep BORDER FORCE!!! happy. Tonight will probably be a shorter outing, but I am still here for most of the day tomorrow before heading to the airport in the afternoon to go to Singapore... more on that, tomorrow.