GOING BUSH

After all my talk about how I would go walking around Taipei every weekend blah blah blah, only this weekend did I finally do it.

After a quick consult with the Lonely Planet, I picked a nice little trail just south of the city that would lead us to a waterfall, luckily the path did not stay paved (as above) for long!

To actually get the bush that surrounds Taipei, we took the metro 8 stops, then caught a minibus, all in all we had an hour of travelling before we actually started to walk.

The sky was relatively clear, so there was a decent view of the city once we got up the mountain (it was more like a hill, but they call them mountains).

We set off, following the sketchy LP instructions.... there was some signage in both Chinese and English in the beginning, but we were soon following the tiniest little track that I had trouble even making out at times.

It was such a nice change to be surrounded by trees, the sounds of nature, fresh air....

... but after about an hour of walking and passing only two groups of walkers on our travels, we came out of the bush and were more than a little disorientated,  Lonely Planet said nothing about this.

We stopped at this odd little shrine, complete with couches and lunched on the rice triangles we had bought earlier from the 7/11, eventually deciding to follow the paved road to see if we could find someone to ask. No, we did not have a map...

We kept walking and eventually came across some people who told us we were in Xindian, a totally different suburb in the southwest of Taipei -  we had begun our journey much further east and had supposedly been walking southward? After locating the bus stop that would take us to a metro station, it looked as though it would be a while until we were rescued. 

Luckily, the Taiwanese are indeed super friendly and not 10 minutes after we began a somewhat half hearted attempt at hitching, we were saved by a man in a red jeep.

Home now and absolutely exhausted. It feels good to have got out and done something constructive with the weekend, even if it did mean getting lost!

I have no idea where we went wrong or how we even ended up where we did, but it was more about the journey then the destination. Maybe we can try again next weekend to find this mystical waterfall...