The Sun Moon Lake experience will be split into 2 parts because there are too many pictures in this post!
Instead of taking a coach to Sun Moon Lake, we were persuaded into a very persistent taxi driver who wouldn’t let us off into booking his cab for NT4000 (~$170-180) for that few hours. We only realized that we were cheated after we came back when other taxi drivers offered us NT2500 – NT3000 (for 2 places – Sun Moon Lake and CingJing Farm).
2 stops are being covered in this post:
1. Puli Brewery
2. Wen Wu Temple
Visiting the brewery can be quite an interesting thing but the visit to this brewery is pretty much boring cause there wasn’t a real tour to demonstrate how the beer where brewed. There are 2 levels.First level sells food that are made of alcohol like alcohol ice-cream or the local snacks like Tai Yang Bing while the second level sells souvenirs of the different culture from Taiwan (eg. Alisan).
PRETTY MUCH BORING RIGHT? The taxi driver couldn’t even be bothered to explain anything. He sat in his car for 20 minutes (yup, we combed the place within 15-20minutes) by taking some pictures of old empty wine bottles and all. Worth a stop if you need the toilet for a toilet break.
It was quite cold when we reached the first stop for the Sun Moon Lake tour as we were traveling uphill.
The view was breathtaking. I know my picture don’t even do any justice to it.
The biggest temple there is Wen Wu temple. It is a Taoist temple dedicated to Confucius and Kuan Kung, the red-faced god of war. We went up one a Monday so it was not that crowded.
You will also see people from Ming Zu singing, performing and selling their CD outside the temple. I must agree that people from Alisan are great singers. My dad told me A’Mei is from Alisan too.
A lot of bells were hung on the wroughht-iron ladders (366 steps). Each ladder represents a year of birth. People would write their prayers on the wind catching paper and hang their bell there. As it is quite windy there, the people believes that the wind will send the written prayers to the gods in the temple. You can buy the wind chime in the temple.
When I moved into the temple, I saw another board with similar function.
You can also buy a fish feed from this machine for NT20 and feed the fishes there.
The view of the temple from the highest peak (taken from the inside of the temple).
As you can see, Sun Moon Lake is more of a tourist attraction for the older people. No shopping was done throughout. But it was a different experience from the city.
There are different stops (I took the yatch and all!) which will be covered in the next post.