Day 17 – Sun Moon lake and Taichung – Taking it easy

2018-11-05

Start: 12:30 / 29 km / 400 hm

Woke up quite late, completely hungover. Was quite tight to check out on point. Had some oden as breakfast and encountered a strange dog from the evening before at the convenience store again. He seemed to be in fact a stray dog, later met him again. Looks like all those stray dogs get often lost in the convenience stores.

Put all our stuff in the car and rented a bicycle for Kuan-You. So we went around the bicycle path on Sun Moon lake, of course the ‘big’ round. 30 kilometres, but that was enough in that kind of state. Also had to climb a little bit and it was hot as usual.

Passed the tourist centre, which is a building with a lovely architecture. Arrived at the south eastern village of the lake and walked a bit around. Actually this seems to be the more lively part of the lake, as there was quite some streetfood available. Had the presidents fish cake, yummy – sooo good.

After seeing sunset at a scenic spot we just arrive on time back at the parking lot to return the rented bicycle.

As the west coast wasn’t that spectacular from the nature, I had decided to skip one day and drive with Kuan-You to Taichung. This leaves me later the option to make a daytrip from Taipei up to the north coast. So packed the bicycle into the car and drove off to Taichung.

Taichung

After having a shower we went off to meet a friend of Kuan-You, picked Jofy up at her place and went to the best hotpot I ever had. Chose the seafood one – wow, so great with a lot of oysters. A kind of meal like this would easily set you back 50-70€ in Germany, if you could find it. Here it was roughly 11€, couldn’t believe it…

A friend of Jofy has a tea shop, so we went there, but it was already about 0:00, so it was unfortunately closed. Such a pity, it’s not open for the public, so would have loved to buy some nice oolong there.

Then we thought about visiting a concert, but arriving there and being slightly still hungover, both were so kind to agree on my wish to go to a massage.

Mind you, as we arrived there it was already 0:30 in the night! But this ultra stylish place was open 24 hrs and I was even allowed to walk in there with a can of beer.

Wow, and this was so nice – a one hour long legs massage (really was looking for it because of all the cycling) for…700 NTD, around 20€.

The woman who was  massaging my legs was quite surprised, how much force she could apply. I mean, I had just 1000 kilometres in my legs, so I knew greater pain. But it felt really great! So relaxing…

Returned to the hotel at roughly 2:30 in the night – Kuan-You had meanwhile decided to drive back in the night, so I said goodbye.

Thank you both for that very special day and so nice to meet you Jofy!

Oh yes, Taichung seems to be one of the best cities to live in Taiwan, besides Taipei – not to big, clean air and very nice people with loads of stuff to do there. Really liked that town…