Taiwan for the 5th time - April and May 2023 - Page 8

I actually walked through Guanghua Digital Plaza first, way too early for things to be open. The actual plaza is the multicoloured smaller building behind the Panasonic building. Nice blue sky, damn hot.

Probably also full of little places selling computer parts. The top floors of the plaza had dedicated data recovery clinics for every brand of hard drive, with people sitting receiving a consultation like they were applying for a home loan. Quite strange.

The walls at street level are lined with toxic mother boards.

Here is the Huashan 1914 Creative Park, complete with brewery chimney. I guess the Sake made here was called flower mountain?

These halls had school students setting up their mainly multimedia artworks for assessment. I was not allowed in.

The red building area was setting up for an anime festival.

Now for Da'an park. Nice apartment building over the road, reminds me of one on Flinders street in Melbourne that I like.

Da'an park station is impressive.

Here is the pond with trees filled with giant birds, none of which you can see in the photo despite there being thousands of the bastards.

Pond scum life.

Not a lot of people sitting in the heat enjoying a show at the amphitheatre today.

Now to head back to Guanghua to end the mouse hunt. The streets around the area are entirely computer shops and nothing else.

Inside the Digital Plaza looks like this, on every level. I had over 100 stores from which to buy a mouse in the digital plaza building alone.

And here it is. A very rare thing. I hate buying things, I especially hate buying things when on holidays. I selected it purely on the basis that the packaging fit into my shorts pocket. I hate it. The ergonomics are crap. But for photo editing it is better than the touch pad on my laptop. I expect it to be raining and cooler later!

Here is the Hakka cultural park. This is the nicest bit. Ancient incense burner.

Most of it was literally an overgrown vegetable garden.

The view from the bridge out of the park that leads down to the river was however, superb!

The first surprise sea of flowers. I did my best to get in the way of everyone's photos. Note you cannot see anyone in my photos, that is because I am standing in front of everyone else.

Second surprise sea of flowers. This walk along the river area was quite a bit longer than I thought. Lots of people.

Looks like I am getting to the end of the park area, time to head uphill.

This is very hard to photograph, but built into the side of a hill is a creative village, which is to say, artists who live and work in tiny shacks that are kind of open to the public.

Here is an example shot through a window, where a guy makes robot art, apparently.

I walked around a nice elevated trail at dusk, which came down here, at what used to be a historic train station.

Overpass time! The actual University is on the right, I dare not go in there though.

There is an old fashion indoor market complete with very cheap eating areas. It reminded me of the neighbourhood food markets in Hong Kong.

It quickly became apparent I would struggle to get into any sit down restaurant, they all had lines, and groups of people. I briefly thought about having one of these, but it is just dough and green onion slices. I am sure it is delicious though.

Bustling street area of Gongguan.

And so, I retreated to a food court for a late (for me) poke bowl, with surprise prawns. Pretty good, pretty healthy. Now... tomorrow is a hiking day. It is supposed to pour with rain, it is actually supposed to be raining now but it is not, it is still 34c. So it will all depend on what the weather is doing when I wake up tomorrow.

Well. It is raining harder than I thought. But I am here now so...

The early parts of the path were quite covered, but still very wet.

Surprise sun dial was a short diversion, but I am standing under a pavilion to take this shot. I waited for the sun but alas, it never arrived.

These rocks were also not slippery. The slipperiest part of today was the tiled footpath in the street.

A summit of sorts, with a mini radio tower. There was lightning! So I stood on the summit next to a radio tower.

Low down view, but look at the cloud and rain. Nice.

Not a lot of elevation today, and under 2 hours station to station, thankfully.

Surprise sports stadium near the top!

I think at this point I am standing on what is called battleship rock. It was a rope climb up the very grippy rock face. It was like sandpaper.

Still lots of cloud and rain.

The ridge walk would be very picturesque in better weather.

More rainy view.

You can walk all the way around that ridge back down into the hot spring area, but alas, not today. Word of the day, alas.

One last view shot. It never stopped raining at all.

The walk down this part of the trail was the darkest and wettest bit of the day.

And while my camera seems to have survived, everything in my pockets was very wet, so here is the result of all that. Also I am back at my hotel before lunch, now what?

The rain is gone. Blue sky in fact. Although every now and then a tiny cloud does come over and it rains for 5 seconds.

Tianmu has modern buildings surrounded by gardens.

Japanese department store 1 of 3, Sogo. A very new looking Sogo.

Japanese department store 2 of 3, and their first appearance on this trip, Takashimaya. Looking old and run down.

This is a gogoro battery station. Instead of charging your scooter, you just ride up to one of these and swap your scooter battery over. This is not a new concept, it was very popular the last time I was here, at that time it seemed much move novel than it does now as electric cars were still 'new' at the time.

That is a lot to take in.

Home of the mighty Dragons. A baseball stadium. Baseball is very popular and everyone that spends time in Taiwan says you should go to a game for the atmosphere. Sounds like fun therefore I won't be going.

Here is the inside of Takashimaya. It appears to have 12 levels plus basements, but I suspect some are car park levels.

I had dinner in Taiwan in a Japanese department store, so I had Korean food. My dinner usually comes on a tray, just like in prison.

Department store 3 of 3, Shin Kong Mitsukoshi. A two tower setup, but also looks new.

There are a lot of these sort of places in Tianmu, making similarly ridiculous claims.

Other than the scooters, the whole area looks like an Australian city, wide streets with footpaths, often with trees up the middle, endless repeats of the same chain stores...

And after quite a long walk, I was back at Zhishan elevated subway station, ready to head back to my hotel and continue drying my waterproof shoes that are wet somehow.

I climbed onto the roof of the MRT station to take this photo of rain.

After heading all the way south on the brown line, hooray, less rain.

I was at the zoo right on opening time. Probably a good idea as it is Saturday today.

As with all zoos, a lot of it has no animals, but it is probably the nicest garden setting anywhere in Taipei. Also here is a cave. One I wont drown in today.

I see these monkeys on most of my hikes. Now I see them in a zoo.

OMG, a panda. At this stage I should mention the zoo entry fee is about $2.50. There is no extra fee to see the pandas. I just saved about $50 compared to seeing them in Adelaide.

Here is the other panda. They need to be separated. They are truly the worlds most useless creatures.

The zoo is on the side of a mountain. I am going to head back to the area tomorrow for a hike, the final hike. All the enclosures are large and green. It would be better if they put creatures in a small cage so you can actually see them.

There are at least 8 kinds of turtles, ranging in flavours from delicious, to super delicious.

This is an indoor area, there are tiny monkeys that run along the hand rails, very hard to photograph though!

A nice example of the lush surroundings, including orchids.

Baby giraffe.

A very rare 2 humper! Australia only has thousands of the boring single humps. The hump part is delicious, Jackie Chan made a movie based on this.

Earlier I was at what I thought was the elephant enclosure, but there were no elephants. It seems they have 3 different areas they herd them between. I think they have a lot of space they can charge about in if they want to.

The dragon enclosure had a lot of dragons, but since I saw one the other day on a guys shoulder in the street, I was underwhelmed.

Apparently a bear or 2 lives in here. I could not find the bear. Maybe the bear is hibernating.

I nearly skipped the bird world part of the show, but it is large and very good, the birds roam free as you wander past.

A different flock of flamingos.

There were signs warning to not get to close to this type of bird. Still a girl stood next to it and held out her hand. Followed by screaming. Actually a few kids were chased around in here by large birds which was amusing.

You can really get close to a lot of different birds.

Final zoo pic, I culled heaps. Stripey horses. They also have space to run about.

So after declining to eat zoo meat in the zoo cafeteria due to the price, I headed back to town and ate overpriced vegan food instead. I was a bit lost because I did not get a buzzer when I ordered and my food did not come on a tray. Of course, it has stopped raining now.

Starting on the camera level in Syntrend. It is not possible to photograph the whole floor at once, it is a weird shape.

You can get out onto the roof though. No rain at the moment. Apparently it is raining ONLY at hiking time tomorrow, I will be annoyed.

Back into Syntrend, and I think this is an exhibition of some sorts on one of the anime levels. Anime hysteria is out of control, people need to devote their energy towards more creative pursuits! We have all seen underage cartoon girls in armoured underwear with giant round eyes fighting tentacles, you are not adding anything new to it!

This is part of the computer accessories floor, I would buy stuff from here if I lived here. It is nice to be able to actually see all the stuff in person. OK that's enough of Syntrend.

After fleeing the main station area and heading back to my hotel area, Sogo #1 was way too busy, so I went outside to see what was going on, and stumbled onto a craft market. Very much like the ones all over South Korea.

The craft market was actually very good, some decent buskers, and others waiting to take the stage in turn.

Here is the dinner I finally got to eat in the food court of Sogo #2, but only after walking around with my beloved tray for 20 minutes. I thought Taipei had too many department stores and food courts, tonight proves otherwise.

Then I walked a different way back to my hotel, through what I thought were back streets, but no, more street markets, another busy area.

An example of a Taipei street. I like the contrast in this shot.

And since every night is megamall night, here is a photo of the mall nearest my hotel, Breeze center (one of many across Taipei). It is a bit high end for me, what happened to Yves? Now it's just Saint Laurent. Now I just need it to not be raining when I wake up tomorrow so the final hike can be completed!