This weekend is the Tomb Sweeping Day, which essentially just means we have four days off in a row. Renegade wife and I are making the most of it by traveling around and enjoying ourselves.

We started off lightly yesterday by driving out to a small amusement park just outside Hsinchu city. The park itself is small, old and pretty lame, except for a few really well executed optical illusions:

A clever use of mirrors make it look like Yini is flying

This tilted house is by far the best, I actually got a little bit motion sick just by walking around in there, it’s that disorienting.

Another shot from the tilted house

A trick of perspective makes it look like I grow as I move from one corner to the next.

Another trick of mirrors.

However, that was not the reason we came there, neither was the plastic dinosaurs and children’s playgrounds. No, we came here for their newest attraction, an indoor ski slope.

It is barely more than the childrens slope in a normal ski resort but considering that I haven’t been skiing in over a year, it felt really good to just get some snow under my feet.

It was a good afternoon but the park had no more to offer so we headed home. Today we decided to go on a slightly longer trip, so we packed our bags, got on the motorcycle and drove north east out of the city, heading towards the south eastern part of Taipei. By mid afternoon we reached Wulai, a popular tourist destination in the Taipei county mountains.

We struggled through the crowded town center, found a hotel then went to check out the surroundings. We found a small train that used to be a man powered lumber train back when there was still logging in this area. We took it to the other end of town where we had a good view of the river and Taiwan’s tallest waterfall.

  • The train is so small it looks like a toy.
  • view from the train
  • Yini enjoying the train ride
  • The waterfall
  • Yini by the waterfall
  • Plenty of people were taking waterfall selfies
  • There was even an abandoned hotel by the river, it’s roof used as a terrace
  • I took a cablecar up to the top of the waterfall just to find another waterfall
  • There was another lame amusement park up there, the only really good attraction was this rope slide thing here.
  • Sunset on the way down with the cablecar
  • Another sunset view
  • They had stopped running the train so we walked part of the way back along the tracks.
  • Artsy shot of the tracks
  • lots of white laundry hanging outside, just looks nice.

After coming back from the waterfall, we had some dinner in the old streets then simply headed back to the hotel.

Final sunset shot to end the post