Day 5 (2/1/07) Yang Ming Shan

today the plan was to go up Yang Ming Shan. we took bus 260 from ximending but had to wait 45 min for it. My sis commented that there seemed to be some sort of curse cuz every single bus that we wanted to take, we seem fated to have to wait very long for it and this was already the third day in a row. first was the bus to national palace museum that day, then the jiufen-keelung bus that never came, and now this. i saw so many bus 307 and 601 that i can already remember that 307 goes from banqiao to somewhere while 601 goes from tianmu to somewhere. it turned out that the bus to YMS comes every 1 h, so apparently we missed the bus which started out at 9 am from the terminal, so we now have to wait for the 10am bus.

At the very last stop which we alighted at Yang Ming Shan, we got some useful advice from a bus engineer there. there was a YMS bus 108 that goes around all the stops in YMS and for NT$60, u can hop-on and hop-off the bus unlimited times. if u dun want to buy the unlimited ticket, each time u hop on the bus, it's NT$15. we were advised not to buy the unlimited ticket cuz according to the bus engineer it was already late morning then (it was around 11.30am) so there was no way we can go to 4 places, he said it was better to go to 2 places at the most and walk those two places thoroughly rather than to go everywhere but touch and go. so we decided to make our way to zhu zi hu (literally translated: bamboo lake) where there were supposed to be lots of restaurants and a very large nursery of a type of white flower (Hai3 yu4). when we were waiting for the bus, there was a black dog running around and it kept sniffing at a lady there. she said it was because she has 3 dogs at home so the dog was drawn to her because of the dog smell on her. then she told us there was another brown dog in YMS which sometimes boarded the bus but gets chased off the bus by the driver halfway up the mountain. we din see the brown dog around that day so we thought maybe it was already somewhere in the mountains and making its way down right now...

at zhuzihu, which was the 4th stop, we had to walk a distance before we reached a small eatery, but at that time it was still quite early so we decided not to eat lunch yet. we asked for directions from the lady boss and my parents sorta promised that we will eat there later when we come back. it was actually pretty cold up there. after so many days in Taipei, i think today was the day i really felt cold, to the extent i actually regretted not bringing my big green windbreaker, in the end i wore two scarves. i never realized the scarf was such a wonderful invention until today. after walking for abt 20 min down a rather deserted mountain road, we finally came to the nursery. actually to be honest, we were expecting to see a very big patch of nice white flowers, but no leh. there wasn't a big patch and there were more leaves than flowers so i din really think it was very nice. but still we took some photos here and there, enjoyed the air, walked around the little shops there. there were a number of restaurants there which actually looked visually more appealing than the very first eatery we came across. i guess a lot of pple would probably have decided to eat here instead of walking back to that eatery, but we decided to keep our promise. in the end we had quite a satisfying lunch.

after lunch, we went to the next place we aim to go: leng3 shui3 keng1 (cold water creek). on the bus, we saw the mist outside getting thicker and thicker. we originally wanted to go to this place called meng4 huan4 hu2 (dream lake) recommended by the bus engineer because there was a special type of grass there, but we turned back halfway because there were warning signboards of possible landslides in bad weather. it was drizzling slightly already, and it was really quite a long walk to the lake. so we went down another trekking path and came to this old suspension bridge which supposedly cannot take more than 10 pple at one time and there was another warning which stated 'Pls pass quickly for ur safety'. this was our last stop at YMS, we caught the bus 108 back to the YMS terminal and took bus 260 back to Taipei main station. My feeling of YMS is that this is a nice peaceful place, pple who like nature and trekking will enjoy it. i thought it might be boring but in the end it turned out to be quite enjoyable. i guess it matters who u go with.

it was our last night in Taipei, so we decided to do some last minute shopping. my brother had been thoroughly bored when he followed us around the previous night so he chose not to follow us but to go back with my parents. we went to Wu Fen Pu, alighting at Houshanpi station. that place was a fashion destrict, supposedly some of the shops there were the distributors of clothes. there wasn't really much clothes to buy cuz the clothes on sale were still geared towards winter wear. lots of long sleeve T-shirts, but also lots of rather trendy looking jackets and trenchcoats which we won't have chance of wearing in singapore. after shopping in wufenpu we went to Raohe night market which was nearby. for some reason i liked it better than shilin, maybe it's because there were less pple here and the chicken i ate here tasted better than the one i ate at shilin. there was a store selling many different flavours of tong2 luo2 shao1, doraemon's fav food. i considered very long whether or not to buy, but in the end decided not to, cuz i think i bought quite lot of things already. we caught the train back from songshan train station to taipei main station. the train was quite comfortable and was only NT$18 which was even less than the minimum fare for the MRT. and it was much faster to go by train to Taipei main station then take MRT back to XMD, rather than to walk all the way back to Houshanpi MRT station to take the MRT.

we spent the night packing, squeezing stuff into our bags, throwing away shoe boxes and packagings to create more space.