This weekend Yini and I were planing to take the motorbike out, stay over for one night, then ride back the next day. However, Yini had some kind of parents day at her school on Saturday and when she came home she was too tired to go out. So, we turned it into a one day  trip instead.

We rode into the moutains outside Hsinchu, and after an hour or so, we came to an abandoned house that we had seen during a trip July but never went into. There was a rather poorly constructed gate across the driveway which we could simply step past and go up to the building which, according to some signs, used to be a fish farm.

  • The outside of the fish farm
  • The ground floor
  • An old faded poster
  • Another angle of the ground floor
  • One more faded poster
  • The second floor is very dirty
  • More of the second floor

There wasn’t really that much to see so after a few minutes of exploring we left for the next goal, another abandoned building that we had seen in July. There are no clear signs or markings but based on the architecture, I guess it is a disused police station.

  • The police station from the outside
  • For some reason there is a sofa at the entrance
  • Broken toilet
  • Ladder up to the roof
  • Stairs to the ground floor
  • A small kitchen
  • The backside of the building

Again, there was not as much to see as I had hoped so some ten or twenty minutes later we were on the road again. We rode deeper into the mountains until we got a waterfall that we visited some weeks ago. Since we needed a rest we stopped there to look around again. Last time we had climbed upwards to get a better look. This time we clambered down bit to see how it looked downstream. Climbing around on the cliffs and boulders among pristine water and lush jungle is a pretty good way to spend an hour or so.

Yini climbing around at the waterfall

Since we still had time left we headed to the next waterfall. It turned out to be a bit harder to find than w first thought and we looked around for a good half  hour or so before we found the trail. We followed a small, rather bad road down to a tiny cul de sac, parked our motorbike then started walking. The trail was rather overgrown and kind of rickety in places but we eventually came to the bottom of the valley. As soon as we exited the jungle we were hit with a cloud of fine spray from the fall, and a spectacular sight.

There are plenty of waterfalls in Taiwan, but not that many of this kind where the stream flows through the air like that, most of the time the water sort of cascades down a series of cliffs. We sat there, enjoying the beauty for a while then hiked back to the road. By now it was late afternoon, so we decided to head home and here we are now, our butts sore from sitting on the motorbike for several hours, but happy.