travel: Taiwan 2012 Day 13: Wulai, Taipei

After breakfast at Palais de Chine - a sumptuous feast like yesterday - we hit the metro to reach Wulai.

Wulai is a hot spring town located south of Taipei, whereas the other famous hotspring town as well - Beitou - is up north.
To reach Wulai, we simply went to Taipei MRT station - only located next door to the hotel - and took the MRT to Xindian station (Xindian line). Xindian station is the last station on the line, so you don't need to worry to overpass it. After arriving at the station, look for bus 849 - usually the one with the most people queuing up.

To take a cab from Xindian station to Wulai town, it would cost TWD 600. You can haggle with the taxi driver, as they also know that most people really would prefer taking the bus which only costs TWD 40 per trip. I heard the taxi driver offering TWD 100 per person if he could take 4 people on board.
We passed and just took the bus.

I have never got the hang on understanding the payment system of Taiwan bus. Sometimes you pay upfront, sometimes when you alight, sometimes both. If in doubt, usually I just follow the people in front of me o_0. This time, we paid when we got off the bus in Wulai, but when taking the bus back from Wulai to Xindian station, we had to pay upfront.

Confusing.

There are a lot of resorts/small spa places where you could hire a private room to enjoy the hot spring. If you are more daring, you can join the locals and other patrons in public hotspring just by the river.

try this wild boar sausage. It's good!

We went to a quieter spot, where people just built their own tub from rocks to trap the hot spring (so the cold river water would not get mixed with the hot spring water), and some of them just immersed there for a long time.
We just dipped our legs inside. It is very warm and definitely took the fatigue away.

For lunch, we went to Atayal Po Po, a small restaurant at Wulai street selling Atayal food. We had rice wine with yoghurt and spicebush & honey tea for drinks; as well as bamboo rice, spare ribs & taro soup, pork in garlic & basil,

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and.. this:

Yep, we tried some bees - deep fried. They don't taste too bad actually, once you go pass the weird mental block that you were going to eat some insects.
Tasted like deep fried small shrimps, although a bit nutty.

After lunch, we walked the rail to the waterfall and took the gondola to Yun Hsien Resort & park on top of the mountain. The tram that should have taken people from Wulai street to gondola station was not operational due to some landslide, so we had to walk to reach the gondola station for around 20 minutes -_-

resident cats

The theme park.. erm... I wouldn't want to be there alone, night or day.

ghost house ride. Enter and you might just find the real thing.

The obstacle course is interesting, but showed signs of not being very well taken care of. We tried a few but skipped on most of them as some of them did not look very safe.

After a wholesome exercise at the obstacle course, we took the gondola back and walked again to Wulai street, then boarded bus 849 back to Xindian Station.

We alighted at Taipei Main Station and made our way to Dian Shui Lou - Huaning branch.

As always, we over-ordered... .

Salty pork & vegetable steamed rice was very tasty. Xiao Long Bao - ordinary and XO style - were so so, Tofu casserole was very soft & flavorsome.

Braised pork in plum sauce was very good - the meat was so tender and just melted in my mouth; chicken soup; scallion pancakes; salty egg yolk & custard bun which was a tad too sweet for me (Din Tai Fung's better)

Then we just walked around the malls surrounding Palais de Chine: Q Square, Shin Kong Mitsukoshi, and KMall, where we spent some time at Gundam Base Taipei - a shop for some gunpla.. .