Taiwan: Day 8

Day eight in Taiwan took us to to Keelung (pronounced Jeelung) which is a port city located in the northeastern part of Taiwan.  Our plan was to take the train to Keelung, and then go to this Japanese style mountain town called Jioufen, then we'd head back to Keelung after dusk to check out the night market.  We pretty well stuck to that plan and it was a pretty fun day.

 Keelung's touristy area of the port.

 One of the market streets ... 

Some of the street meat for sale at the day market.  As much as we intended to, we never did try anything quite so exotic as street squid, but we did eat lots of street sausage and a peanut butter pizza thing.   

We hiked up a big hill to see Chupu Altar and discovered, it's closed on Mondays.  We found out later that apparently we really didn't miss much.  

 There is something beautiful about Chinese characters.... 

If you recall a few blogs back, I mentioned that Tamsui used to be the main port, well this is the new main port, and it was a busy port. 

Here's the full view of Chupu Alter. 

Further along our walk we came across a really big Buddha and this big bell.  When it was struck you could actually feel it all through you.   

Next we walked a little further to the ruins of Ershawan Gun Emplacement.  This used to be the site that protected the port.  What you can't really tell from this picture is just how big this cannon really is. The wall you can see was taller than Josh and I and the mouth of the cannon was at least the length of a forearm.  it was huge!

 Like everywhere else in Taiwan, there were lots of stairs.  These ones we really really slippery.  Josh fell a couple of times going up and down the stairs in this area.

Josh's new friend 

After returning to the main part of Keelung city we took a cab to Fairy Cave Temple.  The whole temple was in a cave and in some of the cavers, you actually had to crawl to get in.  It was pretty neat.  Unfortunately, this is not apparently a popular destination for tourists and it took a good deal of time standing at the side of the road waiting for a cab to show up.  When one finally did, he wouldn't take us as far as our next destination (Jioufen) so we settled on going back to the train station where we caught a bus.

 This is the entrance to old Jioufen street, a Market street that winds its way up the mountain within the Japanese style mountain town.  Lots of good deals, and some good food too.  We especially enjoyed the ice cream wrapped snack.

 Here you can kind of get an idea of what I mean by Japanese style mountain town.

The view... way off in the distance you can sort of see an island.  It was the other side of that island we could see from Yeliu.   

At dusk all the lanterns were turned on as the shops all closed up for the night.  It was so pretty. 

From here, like I said above, we went back to Keelung and had dinner at the night market then took the train back home.  It was a fun day!