8 Days Taiwan Trip [Day 1-2]: Taichung + Sun Moon Lake

I just came back from a good break from Taiwan few weeks back, and decided to start writing about it before I start procrasinating! It was planned as a family trip with my husband’s family, so the trip was a pretty relaxing trip where we visited Taipei, Taichung and Hualien.

8 Days Itinerary in Taiwan:
Day 1 – 3: Taichung + Sun Moon Lake
Day 4 – 5: Taipei
Day 6 – 7: Hualien
Day 8: Taipei

Brief Summary of the whole trip:

Day 1 – Reached Taoyuan International Airport

Day 2 – King’s Garden, Sun Moon Lake, Formosa Cultural Village, Xuanzang Temple, Fengjia Night Market

Day 3 – Rainbow Village, Carton King, Mushrooom Farm, Zhongshi Flower Farm

Day 4 – Yeliu, Golden Waterfall @ Jinguashi, Jiufen old Street, Shifen Sky Latern, Keelung/Raohe Night Market

Day 5 – Free and Easy around Zhongshan district, Ximending district, Ningxia Night Market

Day 6 – Train to Hualien, Free and easy around minsu, Night Market

Day 7 – Taroko National Park – Qingshui Cliff, Changchun Shrine (blocked), Shakadong Trail, Swallow Grotto Trail, Jinheng Bridge, Xiangde Temple @ Central Cross-Island Highway, Seven Star Lake

Day 8 – Back to Singapore

–  Day 1 and Day 2 @ Taichung & Sun Moon Lake-

Day 1

We touched down the airport around evening and got the wifi egg before getting to our hotel via hotel transfer. Le Parker is about 2 hours car journey from the airport so when we reached, it was already close to 8PM. We settled our luggages at the hotel room before proceeding to explore Fengjia Night Market, which is just few minutes walk! I’ll talk about the night market at the later part of this post.

Day 2

Rise and shine! 

Happily got ready by 9:30 AM and we were greeted by our Singaporean driver, Kenneth, who has been a Taiwanese resident for about 20 years. He was quite friendly and easy going. We communicated a lot over Whatsapp prior to our trip, discussing about the itinerary and so far, he has been very flexible and accommodating! I definitely recommend him if you are looking for a English-speaking/bilingual driver. You can visit his Facebook page here: Kenneth Han.

Our first stop was King’s Garden which is located in the Puli Township of Nantou. With its beautiful European castle,  the front view of the entrance is like straight out of the fairytale book! There is a gigantic chessboard which makes me feel like Alice in the Wonderland. On top of that, there is also a Cinderella horse carriage which is pretty great for taking pictures and posting on Instagram. You can consider doing a mini photoshoot free of charge! We went inside the shop which sells pastries and snacks like jelly, nougats and souvenirs. We got ourselves some biscuits as well as passionfruit jelly to bring back home. I recommended getting the passion fruit jelly…it is very nice and refreshing!

Along the way to Sun Moon Lake, Kenneth recommended us this shop, Yi Fu Tang (一福堂), which is famous for their Sun Biscuit (太陽餅) in Taichung. This confectionery has more than 100 years of history, selling wide varieties of flavours and types of biscuits. You can sample their biscuits before you make your decision to buy. They also offer free packing and delivery to hotels if you do a bulk order of more than NT$3000. This will be a good idea for you if you intend to buy for family and friends back home so that you don’t have to lug the boxes around. But we spent less than that, about close to NT$2000 so we had to bring our purchases along with us. Thankfully, we were driving around so we can just dump the stuffs in Kenneth’s car.

 The disappointing thing is that they don’t give a box for our purchases unless we spend more than NT$2000. Other shops gave us boxes for free with no minimum purchase one leh! And we are just a few dollars away. Why they so like that one?

Yi Fu Tang

We drove on to Sun Moon Lake, where we were greeted with beautiful sight of cherry blossom trees in the carpark! It was pretty irony as we seem to be more interested in taking pictures in the carpark since it makes such a great backdrop!

We headed off to sit in the cable car to take us to the next destination, which is Formosan aboriginal culture village. Kenneth helped us to get the tickets before our arrival, so the total cost per person is NT$1000 (Cable car to the culture village NT$650 + Sun Moon Lake Ferry Tour NT$250). You get beautiful bird eye view of nature from the cable car, a glimpse of the whole landscape. Simply breathtaking!

Seeing the name Formosan aboriginal culture village, I was expecting a very cultural exhibition, but to my surprise, it is actually an amusement park. The park is divided into 3 main theme areas: European Palace Garden, Amusement Isle, and Aboriginal Villages.

We headed straight to the Aboriginal Villages first since it is the first stop from the entrance. The Aboriginal Villages area has quite an extensive displays of each aboriginal tribe’s culture and artefacts, giving an exquisite experience to learn about their cultures. The pictures below are one of few examples, displaying the architecture of the house and using objects to depict the layout.  I am also intrigued by their culture because they also did home burials inside their house!

We also get hands-on experience trying out their blow pipe archery as well as the bow archery which the husband and I were more familiar with, being ex-archers ourselves. I pretty much enjoyed the blow pipe archery more since it is something different!

We headed towards the Amusement Isle area. I was pretty keen on the UFO Gyro Drop so we zoomed off to the ride while our parents parted way to the European Palace Garden. My husband did not join in with me and he kept saying that the ride was crazy (I think he also thinks I am crazy…Hahaha!). The UFO Gyro Drop is Taiwan’s tallest free fall of 85 metres so I thought it will be pretty thrilling to experience it. Thank goodness, Brother-in-law was also game and off we went while my husband and sister-in-law remained behind as our cheerleaders + photographers.

My verdict? Highly recommended! 

I got the amazing view as we went up slowly so I don’t really feel that anxious due to the speed going up. As we reached the top, it just paused for few seconds before the sudden drop. Just one second of thrill and all done! Not as scary as I thought it would be. We also skipped our way to the Maya Adventure rollercoaster and I was anticipating it due to it’s 33 metres in height and a couple of 360 degrees turn. But to my dismay, I don’t think it was quite a good ride because the seat was too smelly with sweat for me to enjoy, and the seat is tad too small and I kept hitting sides of my head as we zoomed up and down, left and right.

We were running out of time since we need to catch the ferry ride to our destination so we went to find our parents and did a quick lunch nearby before boarding the ferry. Unfortunately, I do not have the Palace Gardens pictures since I never visit there with parents but hey…Google is an amazing place to check!

We took the ferry from Ita Thao Pier and it drove us to Shush Pier (we skipped this stop as Kenneth mentioned that it has nothing to see) and Xuanguang Temple.

We saw this small shop selling tea eggs, which Kenneth told us that it is the famous Ah Po’s Tea Egg Leaves, 阿婆茶葉蛋, in Sun Moon Lake. I definitely agree that it sells the best eggs in Taiwan so far as I have tried others elsewhere but this one beats all. It is very fragrant so do definitely give it a try!

Sun Moon Lake 日月潭 is located in Yuchi, Nantou County and is the country’s largest freshwater lake that is surrounded by majestic mountains. If you looked at the ferry map, you can see that the lake is divided by the tiny Lalu Island, so that it actually look like the sun on the eastern side and crescent moon on the curved western end.

Here is the iconic monument which has the “日月潭” written on it, which can be found in some places at Sun Moon Lake. I remember Kenneth told us that sometimes the rock is called the Quarrel Rock because there were Chinese tourists quarrelling over the rock as they want to take pictures as keepsakes.

And true enough, we almost got into a quarrel with one of the Chinese tourists who has no sense of basic courtesy. As we were walking towards the rock since there is no queue, a swarming group of Chinese tourists came in from the “Exit” queue ( like why??? The “Exit” is stated in Chinese! ) and took such a long time taking pictures, all come in one by one.  When they were done, they moved off so we went over and posed for photos. But one woman from the same group came back and just stand in front of us and glare at me, expecting us to move away! Such outrageous behaviour! And of course, she won the stare down while I photo bombed at the side.  

 

Actually, there was nothing much to see so we lingered for a while before we took the last ferry back and headed off to Fengjia Night Market.

I LOVE night markets! We dumped our belongings in the hotel room and scampered straight to the night market for our dinner. I must tell you that you should buy your drinks from this stall…it has awesome passionfruit juice with bountiful amounts of pearls for like what…SGD$2 for a big cup? I visited the stall the second time after trying it the night before.

Some of the food we tried:

In my opinion, most of the food at Fengjia Night market (e.g. passionfruit drink, beef cubes and the chicken rolls) we tried were tastier as compared to other night markets we visited in Taichung and Taipei.

Favorite picture of the day:

Stay tuned for Part 2 of my trip soon!