Marian / Shengmu / Matcha hiking trail
Today's hike has about 9 different names. You can find it referred to as Marian or St Marian's hiking trail, the sacred mother trail, Shengmu hiking trail, and now more recently, matcha mountain hiking trail (green tea for those that still do not know what matcha is).
Apparently a few years ago, this was a moderately popular hiking route, but a quasi famous Japanese guy came here and took some photos, applied an aged film filter to the photos and put them on Japanese instagram, along with the caption 'matcha mountain, omg, kawaii *thumbs up* *eggplant* *pedobear*' and a week later flights were being chartered to bring groups of Japanese people here. Look it up, not a joke!
Anyway, if you are playing along at home, it is about a 20km round trip from Jiaoxi station, to the top of Sanjiaolunshan and back to Jiaoxi station, so allow 6 hours and 30,000 steps. If you somehow fluke a bus in each direction, take 6km off.
There are a number of stages to all this, I will explain below with all the many thousands too many of pics that I took today.
Here is Jiaoxi station, it is 2 stops over from Yilan, about 10 minutes, the trains come regularly. But there is a problem, no matter how hard I tried, I could not stop my camera from fogging up! Hence the surreal like dreamy quality of this photo, people would pay money for a lightroom preset that does this.
No bus. And there are no early buses it seems. Weird on a Saturday, I know this will be an extremely popular hike.
Stage one was to walk through the really quite nice and unexpectedly large town of Jiaoxi, a hot spring town it seems. More pics on the way back. There are some big hotels and a golf course as you start to go up the hill.
This is a dam. There are signs everywhere telling you not to swim in the dam. Look closely though and of course, there is a woman swimming in the dam. In Taiwan, signs are suggestions at best.
The next stage of the hike takes you up a scooter accessible path to the Catholic Sanctuary of our Lady of Wufengqi. This has been constructed in a style to entice the local aborigine population to become Catholics. Yeah, that is probably a true fact.
A bit more of the cool church, you will see it again on the way back.
Here is my church. Not a lot of members lately.
The next stage takes you along a gravel track, without steps, to this point, the start of the Marian hiking trail, where a lot of steps will commence.
There are waterfalls.
And lots and lots of slippery steps. I was moist, everything was moist, my bag was dripping with moistness, so was my camera. It was kind of hard to take photos due to everything being slippery and wet, but at least my lense was not fogging up anymore.
After at least an hour of steps, if you go at full idiot speed like I do, you come out into the cloud and the low bamboo area.
This is where 99% of the crowd stops, for the shot of matcha mountain, see below. There is a toilet there I think, I sweated so much no one could tell if I had wet my pants anyway so I did not need to use the actual toilets.
Matcha mountain in all it's glory.
The alternate aspect of matcha mountain. White balance seems a bit warm.
Me, with dirt on my pronounced forehead.
The less matcha-er-ry bit of matcha mountain.
I ascended the little lookout bit, this is not the top, and not the end of the hike.
First I had to stare at this guy and contemplate why everyone aspires to be nailed to a cross as the ultimate achievement in human history. I imagine this perplexes the locals more than it does me.
I will now go up there to the actual top. I kind of had regrets about this, as the path became ankle deep mud. I had to put my camera into my bag properly as if I fell over it would get mud-logged.
There were 1000 groups of people who went to the Matcha view, there were maybe me and 2 other groups that went to the top of Sanjiaolunshan. They had machetes! This is the summit, not a lot to see. I was a bit concerned about snakes as I could not see my feet due to face high grasses, but also ticks, do they have lime disease here? It seems to be a USA only disease for some reason.
For the treacherous journey back down through ankle deep mud, the fog rolled in.
Nice cloud, nice view, fog still on it's way.
Behold, fog. Thankfully it arrived after I was out of face high grass and ankle deep mud.
I stopped for a muddy shoe shot. I just spent an hour in the hotel shower cleaning them. I am glad I opted for my water proof hiking shoes for this trip. They make my feet hot, but its better than squishing mud between my toes for 10km on the way back down.
It was now hot, and foggy, but no rain at all.
I arrived back at the jungle foresty area, with the slippery steps. Still lots of people.
So green, lots and lots of people.
I forgot to show the trail marker on the way up, so here it is on the way down. Kind of looks like an inverted crucifix. Interesting.
Here is some more of the church, On the right edge there is a fake cave made out of concrete. You can never really fully take Taiwan out of any situation.
There is no one at all inside the actual church, just me and my muddy shoes.
Behold, the view back down to... somewhere between Jiaoxi and Yilan.
As I exited the hiking area, a lot of vendors had since set up their stalls for the day, mainly selling fruit, which I never really understand, it would be fruit puree by the time you get to the top.
Instead of some questionable fruit, I headed to the convenience store, and had an ice cream. This dog lives in the store. A rare kind of dog in that he did not immediately attack me.
And now, for my last shots from a long day, a couple of shots of Jiaoxi.
The busy street here looks much like the rest of Taiwan, convenience stores as far as the eye can see.
Yilan to Luodong by train for dinner
No really, should I have spent 3 nights in Luodong instead of Yilan? I look at the map of Taiwan a lot and this is my 5th time here and I had never heard of Luodong. It never seems to get mentioned. And yet it seems to be twice as busy as the much more well known Yilan city. I suspect this is another case of province vs city, Yilan is the name of a city and a province, and in theory the city has a higher population, and yet Luodong has all the colourful lights, markets and people.
Not that it matters much of course, and it is possible that I have not yet seen all of Yilan, I have tomorrow night to check if I missed it, but also, Luodong is about a 10 minute train ride away, just as Jaoxi was earlier today. So the moral of this not even a story is, everything is 10 minutes away in Taiwan.
Now to describe Ludong a bit more. It has a night market that shows up on google maps at relatively zoomed out zoom levels, and my inspection this evening declares that this is warranted. It does not have a mega mall, so there is no food court! SHIT, what now? It has a larger train station than Yilan. Just like Yilan, the train station is on the edge of town, there is basically nothing behind it.
Other than that, it is a small Taiwanese city, there are not a lot of footpaths, there are a lot of scooters, and OMG I did not take a photo of an incense burner today! Challenge, failed.
This is the street leading away from Luodong station, but it is about a km away from the centre of town, the streets get busier than this.
Here is the station, it has a couple of restaurants inside it. The Yilan station has a giraffe sticking out of it, so it's a toss up as to which is better. I will take a shot of the giraffe as I leave Yilan in a couple of days time.
!!!!, !!!!!, Why the hell am I not staying in this hotel? That is a little train at the bottom that is also the hotel restaurant.
This is the only thing that can be called a mall in Luodong (I think). It has no food court. Now what?
Now for the obligatory night market shots. Let me see if I am using obligatory correctly, sometimes I make up words, OK, obligatory is the word is was looking for, quite cromulent.
The lions club have provided this excellent, train?
OK, more night market. It seems to go for many busy streets full of people. I actually avoided some of the busier bits.
People live for sitting outside with thousands of people filing past, as they try not to get hot oil poured over them, or stab the back of their throat with a stick that has a squid on it.
No food court, so I found a healthy restaurant, and had fish. And it was actually pretty great. The purple chunk is beetroot (possibly), and the white vegetable at the top right is some kind of translucent over boiled potato derivative. Today was a 40,000+ step day, how many will there be tomorrow? Do not worry though Korea5 trip from last year, my all time monthly step record is not in danger! That is all for now.