A few days ago, my old friend Johan Svennung contacted me, wishing to visit me in Hsinchu. We already had a dinner planned that day but welet him join in the fun. Since there were no good buses back to Taipei in the night, he slept here, suggesting we go to some hotsprings the next day. So, when we woke up, we borrowed Yini’s car, and drove up to the mountains in search for a wild hotspring (wild as opposed to a hotspring resort). Eventually we found the road that we thought it was on, but saw no signs of it. Asking some locals, we got directions for how to go there, before being told that our small car would not work such a road.
We crept along the small, bumpy concrete trail until we got to a point where the car really couldn’t pass. So, we parked by the side of the road and started walking.
The road down to the river was longer, and more broken than we thought, but eventually we found a gigantic boulder right next to a small path:
We believed this to the the entrance to the hotspring but turns out we were wrong, so we continued along the road a bit further until it ended. There we clambered over the boulders down to the river where we found a few tents, indicating a hotspring that was no longer completely wild.
The hot spring was, as you can see in the picture above, slightly built up, with three different pools made by bonding riverbed stones together with concrete. Thus, it was a bit similar to a hotspring resort with the difference that the river right next to the pools was the only means of cooling off. Since it was rather secluded, with beautiful nature all around, it did feel special, even though the hot pools themselves were more built up than expected. Had it been less secluded, it would not have been worth the effort. As is, I just want to search out other wild hotsprings in the hope that some of them will be properly wild.
Leave a Reply