May 30th 2006 and after a heavy nights drinking the perfect hangover cure was a trip to Jin-gwa-shr and teapot mountain. Dave Silver was keen to come along for the exercise and Mia is a of course a mountain regular. I felt shit at the beginning but after the hike up to the teapot and cuppa from the spout felt much better...
Sarted off with a quick visit to one of the old mines. The staff made us wear safety hats and bave us a pre tour briefing.
Here we are at the entrance with our hats set at a "rakish" angle. The actual trip took all of...ooh...5 minutes!
Here is Dave trying to scale the actual teapot. We were driven back by the slippery rocks so didn't get to sit on top of it. There was no view either because we were in a cloud. Definite cure for my hangover though.
Now back in July 2005 I was about to leave Taiwan again and had never been to Wu-Lai or Jio-Fen and so was determined to right one of those wrongs.
Jio-Fen is overrun with tourists these days so Mia nd I decided to go on another couple of Kilometres to Jin-Gwa-Shr which was an old gold mining settlement and the site of a Japanese POW camp in WW2. Now we didn't get off to a good start. We went to get the bus and stood on the wrong side of the road then watched our bus pull up on the other side....crossed over and had to wait another 40 minutes.
When we finally got there it was nearly 3pm. Too late for the major circular walk I had planned. The way to the start was following this old mining train track...and here you can see me making like a train...
...and Mia with the mountains in the background.
The start of the trek upwards led to an old Japanese temple
looks a bit Greek to me....
the teapot visible in the background...I was suprised how similar to a teapot it actually looked...I mean elephant mountain looks nothing like an elephant...
The old winching building with remains of an engine inside (and a few tins of Taiwan beer)
weather was a bit dodgy so time for Mia to pose with a brolly
looking down at the temple we had visited earlier
Even higher up was an old open cast mine...
with the inevitable danger sign....I was disappointed there weren't any mine enterances to be explored
We did a circular walk from this mine but much as I wanted to didn't continue all the way round to the teapot itsself. We went down and on to Jio-Fen for dinner...very pleasant indeed
