Taiwan Travel Diary #12: Hualian Day 2

Hey everyone~I finally get around to write about day 2 of my trip to Hualian ^^

Day 2 wasn't as interesting as the first day, as we already visited Hualians most famous places on the first day. It was still a nice day though.

Our first stop was Lintian mountain forestry center, which was about an hour outside of Hualian city. It's famous for its special kind of wood, so there were a few street stalls selling wooden accessoiries and other various things made out of that wood.

We also bough some super sweet ananas there. 

This sign worried me a bit, but luckily we didn't encounter any snakes.

We spent over an hour in the forestry center, which was kind of boring to be honest...it was a beautiful place, but not much different from any normal forest back in Germany.

I really liked the abandoned railroad though, it looked so pretty!

There were lots~ of mosquitos though.

Afterwards we ate lunch at a Chinese restaurant again.

I tried yellow watermelons for the first time there. It looked really special, but the taste is just like normal red watermelon.

This was a lamp outside the restaurant, which looked interesting. I thought it was a bone first, but it's just wood.

fish outside the restaurant.

Our next stop was Hualian sugar factory. It's actually not a sugar factory anymore, right now it's mostly famous for selling many different kinds of frozen products and ice-cream.

Unfortunately we only had about 40 minutes to spend there, even though this place looked really interesting and was filled with people.

There were quite a few things to do there, apparantly.

The main reason we went there was...ice-cream.

They had so many flavours!

I got Papaya ice-cream, a friend had peanut ice-cream (which tasted amazing~) and we also ended up tryung Wasabi flavoured ice-cream.

Afterwards, we did some fishing. Very traditional fishing. apparantly.

Ami tribe traditional fishing! they basically build the fish “homes” and when you lift those quickly out of the water and shake them over a net, small fish will fall out. An all eco-friendly natural way of fishing. you barely catch any fish though.

They also showed us traditional hotpot. since the ami tribe were mostly hunters, they didn’t carry stone or earthen bowls with them. all was made out of wood. and since wood burns they can’t heat those bowls up on flames. so they used special stones , heated them up to 700 degrees celsius and then dropped them in the bowls that were filled with wster so that the water would boil and cook the ingredients. the fish that they cooked this way actually tasted quite nice.

Our day ended with dinner again. 

 Hope you enjoyed this post.

Have you ever been to Hualian? If yes which places did you visit?

If not, would you like to go?

Please tell me in the comments below.

Love, Lydia

Taiwan Travel Diary #11: Hualian Day 1

Hey everyone~ I finally get around to write about my experiences in Hualian~~
Our universitys International Office organized a 3D2N trip to Hualian, a city in the central east of Taiwan, mostly famous for the Taroko national park.
As they organized everything for us after we paid 2000NTD (super cheap, really), including train tickets , hotel booking and a tour bus, I can't really tell you much on how to get to Hualian etc.

Our hotel rooms were really nice too, Four people shared a room each.

Our first stop after arriving at Hualian was A-zone, some sort of cultural zone. 

Unfortunately, everything was closed until 11.30AM, and we arrived around 10AM.

For lunch we headed to a Chinese restaurant, where a variety of local dishes was served.

My favourite was the salty fish. Actually it was everyones favourite, so it got eaten up to the bones rather quickly.

After lunch we went to Taroko national park~

Our tour bus dropped us off at a few different places, and then we got to walk along a short path.

I'd recommend spending a whole day at Taroko, as our 3 hours there were definitely too short.

Taroko is really awesome for hiking~

Make sure to bring drinks and snacks, as I didn't see too many rest stops there.

Sorry for the photo spam, but the scenery was gorgeous, so just enjoy without reading too many words :P

At this place they actually had a small museum of aboriginal culture...but inside there were quite a few huge wasps flying around so I didn't dare to go in.

Afterwards we headed to Chi-Hsiang Tan 

According to its name, it's a lake but actually it's a part of the east coast.

The weather wasn't that great but luckily it didn't rain.

We had lots of fun there, skipping stones and taking photos~

I thought the sea was quite special. See that dark line at the horizon?

That's a differently coloured part of the sea !

Our last stop was at Chonghua street night market, where we got to buy dinner ourselves~

We tried the (apparantly) most famous Baozi in Hualian. They were delicious~

Other than that, there wasn't that much to see at this night market. It was mostly just clothing stores.

We met some really nice students from Mainland China there and went to eat shaved ice together.

This Mango ice is theirs, we had Honey melon ice as take-away so it wasn't that pretty to photograph (but super delicious still)

That's it for today~ ^-^ 

I hope you enjoyed my photospam :D

Would you like to go to Hualian? Tell me in the comments below.

Day 2 and 3 will follow soon.

Love, Lydia