Taiwan Travel Diary #21: Shifen

Hey everyone~

finally, another Taiwan post! I'm in Korea right now so i'm really sorry for not updating regularly.

This post is about a small town about an hour away from Taipei:

Shifen

The easiest way to get to Shifen is to take the Ruifang line (train) from Taipei main station.

I used to think there was a direct train, but apparantly you have to change trains at Ruifang.
Don't worry though, all signs in train stations have English on them too and when buying the ticket it's enough to state your destination so even if you speak zero Chinese, you'll still be fine.
Both tickets (Taipei to Ruifang and Ruifang to Shilin) should only cost around 100 NTD altogether (one way)

There isn't that much to do in Shifen, as it's super small, but it's incredibly beautiful.

Movies were filmed there too (forgot which one though).

One must-see spot in Shifen is the waterfall.

Which is apparantly closed after 5pm, so here's a photo of the river instead.

The waterfall seems to be inside of a park so if you want to see it, make sure to get there before 5pm.

It was okay though, we managed to find this pretty bridge to take photos at:

Now back onto the main area of Shifen:

The biggest reason for people coming here are the paper lanterns. They're everywhere, you can buy one for just 200NTD and let them fly off right from the train tracks.

The paper lanterns symbolize different areas of luck in life, depending on their colours.

The sellers usually have charts in English as well, explaining what each colour means.

On those paper lanterns, you can write wishes for your, or others future.

People say if you write your wishes down and then light the lantern and let it fly away, your wishes will become true.

On another note, Shifen has a lot of pretty bridges.

So all in all, there's not a lot to do in Shifen, and not a lot to eat either, but it's a super beautiful place to visit if you have the time  to go.

We ate dinner at a nightmarket near Yuanshan station that day because we didn't mange to find anything we wanted to eat in Shifen.  Had some delicious Ramen, and then called it a day.

So that's it for today, my apologize for this post being rather short.

We visited Shifen right after our trip to Houtongs cat village so we were quite exhausted and headed back a bit early. Hopefully next time i go I get a chanace to take photos when it's dark too.

Would you ever like to visit Shifen, or have you already?

Please tell me your thoughts in the comments below.

Love, Lydia