Taiwan: Magical Jiufen Mountain // 台湾的九份

For our second full day in Taipei, we set off to check out the Sun Yat-Sen Memorial museum. I have read a few books on Chinese history and sat through a few lectures in college that mentioned Sun Yat-Sen and his buddy Chiang Kai-Shek, but it was a pretty cool experience to read about their political endeavors and revolutionary beginnings. Yay for learning about history!

Next on our list for the day was to make our way to JiuFen (九分), a beautiful mountain side town of Taiwan. It is a popular tourist destination and is largely known for inspiring scenes in Hayao Miyazaki’s film Spirited Away. I am a big Miyazaki fan so I was pretty stoked to check it out! We took a 45 minute bus ride from downtown Taipei to JiuFen. Unfortunately, we were rather unlucky with the weather, and it was pretty much pouring when we arrived, but on the bright side it added a kind of mysterious and calming aura.

One thing I really loved about JiuFen was all of the colors. Just walking through the tarp-covered side streets was awesome. There was so much to see! Fruit stalls selling fresh mangos, cold drip coffee for sale, pineapple cake sellers, jewelry makers, touristy knick-knack shops, xiao long bao restaurants… An overwhelming amount of the vendors were selling food and snacks and THAT was what got me. I think I bought like three souvenirs and spent most of my other money on food. NO REGRETS.

The most magical part of the mountain town was seeing the popular JiuFen Old Street. It was lined with village homes and small shops with beautiful red lanterns hanging from every building. For when we were there, the best time of day to see the lanterns was at about 6:30pm when the sun began to disappear behind the mountains. Once we arrived, all of a sudden the street began to light up with these beautiful traditional lanterns and the fog shrouded around us. The pictures can’t capture the essence of the street, but it was really magical. Even though we were all soaked and tired, we were so happy to be there and experience this amazing place together 🙂

We returned that evening whipped and with super wet and pruny feet (ew). Before passing out, we pre-packed what we could and then set our alarms for 4am for one last Taiwan adventure!

At 4am we begrudgingly got out of bed, threw on whatever clothes were still remotely clean and set out to climb Elephant Mountain (I love cities that have mountains) to see the sunrise at 5:45am. It was a pretty impressive feat. We were half asleep most of the time and just plain out of our minds loopy but that was probably a good thing considering how many steps we were forcing ourselves to climb so early in the morning. We started climbing when it was still dark outside and we reached the top just in time. We had the whole view to ourselves, except for an old Taiwanese guy that was doing some morning hip rotations and tai-chi right beside us. He probably thought we were so annoying when three chatty girls arrived and started taking photos of everything (heheh…)

I consider myself a morning person but I don’t even remember the last time I was up early enough to watch the sunrise. It’s such a great thing to do! The city is still quiet and you can actually hear yourself think. I like to keep myself centered and at peace with my environment, which is very difficult to do in Shanghai, and this was exactly what I needed. I’m so happy that we made ourselves do it because it was the perfect ending to our stay in Taiwan.

It was time to leave, although we felt like we had just arrived. We definitely were not ready to return to crazy Shanghai because we were just having too much fun and enjoying the laid back Taiwanese lifestyle. My recommendation is that everyone should visit this magical place, especially if you like food, shopping and outdoors activities. It’s just hard to put into words how amazing it is… Now that I know how easy it is get to Taiwan, I’m already looking forward to my next trip there!