April 5, 2021
It’s the Tomb-Sweeping festival in Taiwan. Everybody goes on holiday; NTNU is shut for a six-day break. This year it’s also Easter at the same time – I’m typing this on Easter Monday. The weather is beautiful, sunny with temperatures in the 20s [Celsius], albeit with some haze out of China. You can feel the heat beginning to build; in a few weeks it will become uncomfortably humid and sweaty.
Nearly two weeks ago I went on a field trip with Teacher Tang to Jiufen (九份) and Jinguashi (金瓜石). This was an official trip, with Teacher Tang filling out a form in advance.
Jinguashi is just to the east of Jiufen. Jiufen is 36km from Taipei Main Station, about the distance from Bankstown to Northbridge via the M1 and M5 [note: these are suburbs in my home city of Sydney, Australia], though it feels a lot longer.
Teacher Tang very kindly took all of these photos and posted them to LINE so I could get access to them.
On our way to Jiufen, in the tunnels under Taipei.
The countryside outside Taipei, taken from the train.
We stopped at Ruifang and had brunch in the markets near the train station. I bought a “pepper bun” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hujiao_bing); then we boarded a bus to Jiufen that took us up the mountain via a narrow switchback.
The view from Jiufen was amazing. This photo was taken facing north-west; Keelung is just visible in the middle distance centre left, and Taipei is out of the photo to the left.
You can get a sense of Jiufen’s dramatic and beautiful location by watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qJy-1XdqjY .
Jiufen was a maze of passageways like the one pictured above, over a steep mountain, completely given over to tourism. There wasn’t anything like it in Australia.
Teacher Tang took me though narrow alleys, dodging motor-scooters, and a walk up some steep steps – I almost didn’t make it. The picture is of me resting after having climbed; the entrance to the steps is the glowing rectangle to the left.
We also visited a temple, pictured above. The temple was big, and Teacher Tang captured its name, so I assumed I could go back later to provide a link for you. But I couldn’t find it on the map, nor by online searching. All I can offer is the temple is most likely Daoist, as the character “宮” denotes a Daoist temple (the characters are written right to left in the old style).
Next we went to Jinguashi, a short bus trip climbing over the ridge and down into the valley with the blue sea below.
Jinguashi is inseparable from gold and copper mining. I dutifully made Teacher Tang take pictures of me in the Japanese contiguous houses at the entrance to the complex:
the Gold Museum (https://www.gep-en.ntpc.gov.tw/):
and the entrance to the underground mine, with miner’s helmet:
But in researching this email I found most of this material is in the YouTube clip
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoa8CaUFTbs
so I’ll refer you to that.
I also came across a text version of the YouTube video: http://www.formosaguide.com/p/jinguashi-travel-guide.html – but feel free to skip it if you aren’t fascinated by Jinguashi.
Then Teacher Tang and I took the bus straight back to near Taipei Main Station – wonderfully quick at the beginning with the freeways, but ended in traffic jams.
Richard
Wandering Richard 