We left our hotel pretty early in the morning thinking we would reach the wedding ceremony in good time. When we were just a few kilometers from Sun Moon Lake however, we got stuck in a massive traffic jam. When we finally made it into town the main street was closed for cars so we had to go around. When we got to the other side, that was also blocked and it took us a while to figure out a way past; by the time we had parked the car we had already missed the ceremony. Luckily that is just a formality in Taiwan, the real wedding is the banquet, so we didn’t miss anything crucial. It might have been because of the long weekend, but if the crowds in Sun Moon Lake are regularly this bad, I’m not sure it’s really worth the visit anymore.

  • Waiting for the banquet to start
  • Yini before the banquet
  • Some small dishes on the table
  • The bride and groom entering
  • So many people want to take photos whenever the bride and groom enter

The wedding was nice but uneventful, and as oftentimes with these kind of things I felt rather out of place. Anyway, the banquet ended about three in the afternoon so we still had a few hours to play around. After a bit of searching we found out there was a kind off earthquake museum nearby which sounded fun. It was not so much a museum per se, as an area with some results of an earthquake still visible from a couple of viewing platforms.

The first was a house where the ground under it had collapsed, strangely enough the house had survived but it was now leaning pretty badly.

  • The leaning house
  • Yini showing just how much it leans

The second was a large field that looked like the earth had been dug up by a drunk giant. Essentially, a huge landslide had gone down the mountain side turning it into a complete mess.

The broken ground

The third was a ruined house that stood empty and decaying. The story of how it got like that was pretty amazing though. When the earthquake struck, the ground beneath it gave way and the entire house slid some 150 meters further down the mountain. Miraculously everyone inside it survived with only minor injuries.

The abandoned house from two different angles

At this point it had started to get dark so we headed down the mountain and found a hotel. More adventures await tomorrow.