Like Pingxi, Wulai's one of those places in un-Taipei-like places in Taipei, and a great area to visit when you want to get away from the hustle and bustle of busy city life.
You can't get there by train, so it's less convenient than Pingxi, but you can still take the bus.
We were there last Friday for another travel story.
In Wulai, you can hike, watch birds, look at the waterfall and search for a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that often appears over the waterfall. There is also a gondola you can ride to get a good view of the valley and of the waterfall. Oh, there are hot springs there too. Wulai was named by the Atayal tribe people, who were the original locals there. "Wulai" means "hot water" or "hot spring." So because of its aborigine roots, there are also Atayal sing and dance shows to see if you're interested. I always like looking at their traditional outfits and seeing how they differ from tribe to tribe.
The water is supposed to be beautiful, but there's been too many typhoons recently, so when we went, it was really muddy and not quite attractive at all.
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6 comments:
You forgot to mention your modeling naked in the hotspring pool. I can't remember the last time I appeared naked in front of millions of people.
That wasn't me...
Just love that mantis in your photo. I'm not much of a fan of insects, but always think of mantis as being cool ones - they remind me of 斬柴佬 Charles Bronson.
One time when other bikers and I rode to Clearwater Bay in HK, I found a mantis walking across the carpark towards the bushes, swaggering forward slowly but deliberately with his "forearms" propped up.
I feared that an oncoming vehicle would crush that dude (那就真的是「螳臂擋車」了), so I picked up an empty cigarette pack from the ground, let that guy crawl onto it, then brought it to land next to the bushes. That fella just kept on movin' - well, what did he know, right? :-)
I'm so happy to hear that you go out of your way when you can to protect these little guys. I'm not a big fan of insects, either, but I'm not a fan of killing them either. To tell you the truth, I pick up cockroaches when I can and toss them out the window, instead of giving them the shoe treatment. It sounds gross to touch them, but after all, they are just insects. I don't like them, but I just can't bear to kill them.
BTW Peter, do we know each other or did you just wander on in? You're in Hong Kong? Tell me about yourself!
Yup, I'm from that famous concrete jungle. In fact, I just returned from a weekend walk-around in TPE a couple of weeks ago!
Well, I was referred to your blog by an international ex-colleague of mine, an Englishman who now works as a translator for a newspaper down at NeiHu district - it publishes in English and Chinese. He thought that your blog entry regarding the riot (yeah, the one where you got your bruise) was pretty good. After reading it, I kinda wander 'round and chanced upon this one with the mantis.
Turning back to the insect issue, while I'm OK with mantis and cicada, I'm not so happy with cockroach. When I was a kid, the family which lived downstairs from my family apartment was Shanghaiese, and they cooked greasy stuff everyday which attracted a lot of 小強. They often wandered up to our place, and a few of them actually flew around and raided us. One time I was grabbing my shoes, but scratched the back of a big fat roach instead. Yuck! So when I was young, I'd wham them with whatever I could lay my hands on, and then grab my dad's lighter and burn them at the stakes. (And I didn't tell you about one crawling up my leg inside my jeans when I was drinking at a bar, right?)
Luckily, I haven't seen any cockroach in my home for a few years already. Perhaps because I don't cook and thus have nothing for them to eat, or perhaps my dog ate them all for high tea or late-night snacks without my knowledge ... I don't think I'd bother to find out. :-P But I now realize that it just happens that they become roaches and they are just trying to survive, so I'd just let them be if they don't come to bother me.
Anyway, have a merry Christmas (yup, it's next week), and hope to see you on screen here some time soon!
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