Keelung Area 11th April

The weather was better today – skies still a bit overcast, but less so. In Taiwan that seems to mean warmer and more humid. So maybe a good thing we had an early start for our excursions. Same deal, herded onto buses for a relatively short and painless drive.

First stop was Yehliu Geopark, a bit north of Keelung. This is a small headland where the sandstone has been carved into shapes. The most famous of these is the Nefertiti-like Queen’s Head, where people queue to have their photos taken like this.
                                                               

It’s popular with the Taiwanese and was getting pretty bust by the time we filed back to the bus. Although it’s set up for tourists it all ran pretty smoothly and wasn’t restrictive or irritating. It wasn’t spectacular, but it was nice, the more so because we’ve been on the ship or in cities for some time.                                    


Our next stop was the town of Shifen, on a hillside south of Keelung. There seemed to be quite a few of these sorts of town, because Taiwan’s pretty mountainous. Here all of the buses park at the bottom of the town and you shuffle up seemingly endless steps with the crowd through the middle of the town. The humidity made this a bit harder.

   









Then the steps intersect the old street. I don’t know what I was expecting, something traditional, but the old street is now endless shops, essentially a market, winding gradually back down the mountain. It is famous for its fish balls, taro balls and ginger tea. But we restrained ourselves. Shifen is particularly famous for sky lanterns – paper hot air balloons released during a festival and by tourists at other times, but which we didn’t see (don’t know why not).

                                                    

We got back to the ship mid-afternoon and were pretty tired, so we didn’t do much until about 6pm when we went up to the decks to watch the ship leave the port. Then dinner and we wandered around the ship, going to a trivia competition (scored very average) and to a so-so show. By the time we turned in the ship was rolling in the way that causes people to take a serpentine path down the corridors.

 

 








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