Tag Taoyuan mountains
Shimen Reservoir is a big man-made lake in the mountains outside Taoyuan City. It is a popular tourist destination known for its beautiful views of the lake and the surrounding mountains, and nowadays there are more than ten distinct tourist attractions in the area. As everyone knows, with tourists come business opportunities, and a number of hotels, restaurants and cafés have sprung up along the lake shore. In the past it was common for visitors to stay overnight but as transportation improved, especially with the construction on the No. 3 highway, the market for hotels has gone down. As a … Read the rest
A couple of Taiwan’s major country roads (road number marked by a blue shield) go through the mountains. Last year, Renegade Wife and I rode across the island on one of them, number 14 – often referred to as the Central Cross-Island Highway – and despite some rather miserable weather, it was a fun little adventure. There are a few more that look very tempting to a motorcyclist studying a map of the country and as it happens, they are connected in a big loop. With Tomb Sweeping day extending the weekend to four days, and the weather finally becoming … Read the rest
Renegade Wife is often nice enough to search for interesting places for us to go. A little while ago she found one place which used to be an amusement park but has later been taken over by a Buddhist organisation who have turned it into a kind of temple or monastery. Many of the old amusement park buildings still stand however, but remain unused; in essence, it’s like an abandoned amusement park within the temple grounds. This sounded very interesting to us so we went to check it out.
You don’t have to go to Europe to find castles 
The castle up
This is part two in a series of posts about crossing Taiwan from west to east. Unfortunately part one has gone missing somewhere in the land where data goes to die. At this point I’m not able to recreate it so a quick summary will have to do. Basically, we took the car and drove through the mountains north of Hsinchu, following the so called Roma Road going eastward, stopping here and there along the way. Here’s my favorite photo from the first day:
That’s it for the summary, now on to the second day of the trip:
We slept … Read the rest