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