Jiufen

Today, we planned a day trip out of Taipei to go hiking and visit some scenic towns. So, we donned our hiking boots and took the train to Hutong Cat Village. It was previously a booming mining town, but when the mines shut down, visitors began feeding the cats, causing the cat population to boom. Now, they have shops selling cat food to tourists and cat cafes.

When we arrived in Hutong, we first picked up some small cat pellets and then tried to feed them to the cats, as a pretext to letting us pet them. It worked fairly well, but as they get fed so much, a few of them were a bit snooty about our dry food. The cats were cool, just lounging around in the middle of the street or asleep by walls, but the sound of a bag shaking quickly stirred them.

In the village, they also have a huge free mining museum, which used to be the processing factory for the coal. It still has a lot of the old rusted machinery in it, and the exhibition is built up around it.

As we wandered around outside in search of friendly cats, it began to rain heavily, so we took shelter inside a nearby cat cafe where we had lunch while watching the rain. It felt super cozy.

Given the amount of rain, we gave up on our plans for a hike and decided to go straight to Jiufen, which has amazing street food and lanterns decorating the town. It's said to have been the inspiration for the town in Spirited Away.

It was beautiful, and the narrow winding streets had food and tea stalls and trinkets, which was a feast for the senses. We walked up and down and then realized how tired we were, so we decided to head back to Taipei for the evening. We stopped off at a local fast food chain called Mo Burgers where I got a shrimp burger and James got a rice bun fish burger.

On our 4th day in Taiwan, we decided to rent city bikes and see the town. The bikes cost about 20 cents for 2 hours, and the cycle lanes through the city and the parks were perfect, making it irresistible not to keep riding for hours. We cycled up to the National Palace Museum where we ended our cycle and bought tickets and looked around at some of the precious artifacts held there. After lots of days of walking, our little legs were too tired to do anything else, so we spent another quiet evening resting and doing any last bits of laundry ahead of our flight the next day.

On our 5th and final day in Taiwan, we spent the morning apart in search of different things. We were catching our flight at 9 pm that evening but still had a whole day to fill. So we left our bags at the hotel, and I headed off to a bookshop in search of a guidebook for SE Asia, and James went to an Electronics plaza. After a couple of hours and success on both ends, we met up on the metro and headed out of town to the city zoo. It was £2.50 (!) for both of us to get into the zoo, which is insane and such good value. The zoo was huge and hosted a vast array of animals, some of which were more local to Asia than what we usually get in Western zoos. The enclosures were pretty big and well-stocked with structures and vegetation for the animals. The highlights were the aviary, where we finally managed to see the national bird of Taiwan, the mandarin duck, and another colorful pheasant that is the closest relative to the dodo. My highlight was achieving my trip objective of seeing a sloth! As they're only native to South America, a zoo version was the best I was going to get, but it was still pretty amazing seeing them in person and so close up. After we'd seen as much as we could at the zoo, we headed back to collect our bags and get to the airport. The airport was very quick and easy to get through and very empty. It only had one food outlet which played the same track on loop which basically only consisted of a chorus, that went '...I'll be happy tomorrow, so let's be happy...' 😵‍💫 The flight was thankfully smooth and pleasant and was a great way to start our time in Thailand.Read more