Day 2 - Puli and Sun Moon Lake

NOTE: MY PHOTOS ARE STILL UPLOADING INTO MY FLICKR ACCOUNT. I'LL GO BACK AND EDIT THIS POST TO INSERT PHOTOS LATER. Until then, you're welcome to go directly to my flickr account to check out photos from the day.

I’m writing this from our hotel in TaiChung. It’s supposed to be a nice international hotel, but it’s not. It’s old, the carpets in the hallway are all stained, and we could not figure out how to make the power go on and had to have someone from the front desk come to show us how to turn on the lights. We got into our hotel between 7-8pm and once we figured out the lights situation, talked to my mom and dad via video we were all ready to go to bed. I woke up about 3:30am, and it's time to start uploading photos off the cards and start blogging!

In the morning we indulged in the Grand Hyatt’s breakfast buffet once again. We’re going to have to quit going there, because I don’t think I’d fit into my pants anymore if we ate her every morning for a week. We hit up the pastries first off. There was honeycomb hanging in a contraption to allow the fresh honey to drizzle out and collect in a pan below. Mmmmm. We had some pastries and then checked out the Chinese section again. To our surprise, we'd missed half of the Chinese selection yesterday. There were six kinds of steamed dumplings and rolls, as well as all of this other stuff including Chinese pickles and the famous thousand year old egg. I've read about thousand year old egg and seen videos of it on travel shows and have been intrigued by it. Kevin plopped of these black eggs down on his plate right away. I passed. I'll post video later in a separate post about this experience.


We met our tour van driver David in the hotel lobby at 8:10am and we loaded up into a van to pick up the rest of our group. The others were staying at the Howard and Caesar Park. The first family is a Taiwanese American family from San Francisco, a mother and her college/late high school aged children. Interestingly, the mother's hometown is Tainan, where Hannah Claire lives! This is the first time these kids have been to Taiwan, and they just returned to Taipei from a trip to Tainan. The second family is an Asian American family from Los Angeles, a mother and son who's about 12 years old. After picking everyone up, we set out for our tour.


It was about a four hour drive down highway three to TaiChung and the over to Puli. On the way it was interesting to watch the land change. It went from metropolitan city life, to manufacturing, and then agricultural when we got off the highway and drove in the mountains. Our tour guide pointed out what was growing in the fields along the way. We saw rice, corn, tobacco, betelnut, sweet potato, strawberries, dragon fruit, sugar cane, and flowers.

I'd read about betelnut and the betelnut girls, but it still surprised me to see little glass boxed shacks with scantily clad women along the roadway, sometimes one on every block in towns. There are flashing lights outside drawing attention to the betelnut beauties. Click here for a link to a starting point to read about betelnut beauties. Our driver asked several times if Kevin could like to stop to buy some. I answered for him. NO. Kevin wouldn't want it anyway, but it is an interesting phenomenon.

Our driver stopped along the road to buy from an old man selling sugarcane and sugarcane juice. We bought a bag of sugarcane and tasted someone else's juice. The cane is pulpy and you suck the juice out of it. The street vendors give you lots of little plastic sacks with you big sack of sugar cane. I ate several bites, and then realized that the others were sucking out the sweet juice and then spitting out the sugarcane pulp into their little sacks. Ahh. That's what the little sacks are for!

Puli is in Nantou County. Our guide described this at the heart of Taiwan. Our guide said that Puli is famous for water, wine, women and weather, and that there are a lot of retired Japanese living there in the pristine mountainous area.

We stopped at a little shopping area for tourists that our guide described as a winery. There were several vendors that sold rice alcohol. We tasted a few samples, but didn't care for it. Some were very strong and others very bitter. There were gummies, preserved fruits, and all kinds of sweets. We did buy several boxed treats to take home.

We went to a restaurant for a late lunch. Our guide told us at the end of the dinner that this was a meal specific to the Hakka people (see link to read about he Hakka). We had pork intestine, pork feet with mushrooms, tea served in Dixie cups, sticky rice, beef with green onions, a vegetable, a dish with fresh bamboo, a soup with pork, and orange slices for dessert. We tried everything and only used chopsticks. I surprised myself, and I'm really getting the hang of them... except for eating sticky rice when it's not so sticky. The pork intestine had the consistency of calamari. I think we limited ourselves to one bite of that. :)

After lunch we drove further into the mountains to go to Sun Moon Lake and visit several temples and a pagoda. There were a lot of tour buses.

Our first stop was the WenWu Temple (click link), which is very large and impressive with several halls, but very touristy. I have lots of photos from this temple, and the photos speak for themselves. You could buy wind chimes and have the temple workers pass them through incense smoke by temple workers. The chimes are hung and used to write their names and the contents of their wishes. You ring your chimes at the top of the steps and then go hang them next to the step of your Zodiac character.

I won't get into a discussion here about temples, except to say that I'm thankful that my God allows me to talk to him by prayer anytime, anywhere... without the need for burning paper money or buying wind chimes.

We drove around the lake to the pagoda that I really looked forward to seeing. We hiked up many, many, many, many steps to the top a mountain to the Ci En Pagoda (click link). I didn't think I'd make it, but after several rest stops and a couple hits off the albuterol inhaler, I did. I stayed at the bottom and enjoyed the view while Kevin hiked himself up the stairs to the very top of the pagoda to ring the bell. BONG!!! I'll post some video of Kevin's bell ringing later.

My favorite stop was at the Syuentzang Temple (click link) because of the beautiful gardens outside, and there were several monks and worshipers to people watch. Kevin rang a another big bell outside the temple. BONG!!! I've got video of that too, of course. A monk smiled very nice to me and motioned for me to come light some candles, but I respectfully declined. I'll just watch.

Outside the temple we bought tea eggs from an old woman. They were 8 New Taiwan dollars each. That's equivalent to 25 cents in the US. They taste like hard boiled eggs with a little tea, soy, and flavoring from star anise. They're pretty to look at, but not as strong as I expected them to be. I tried to make tea eggs before but used anise seed instead because I didn't know about star anise at that time. I guess I just expected them to be more flavorful. The eggs are stained brown and pretty, but really don't taste that much different.

Here's the posts where I tried to make tea eggs before at home:
Part 1
Part 2
Star anise does not equal anise seed

We drove about two hours back to TaiChung to spend the night. Our guide pointed out all of the restaurants that we could venture out into for noodles, dim sum, and hot pot... but we were so tired and just wanted to go to bed. It's 5:30am now and Kevin's still sleeping. I think he's got about 9 hours of sleep in him so far... and he's not moving... so I don't think he's ready to wake up any time soon. Heehee!