June 27: Taiwan Day 3

This morning we headed out around 8:30 am to tour around the northern coast of Taiwan. We took the same van that picked us up from the airport, but without all the luggage we had plenty of room. The first place we went to was a small mining town named Jingueshi. There was a waterfall that we stopped at where the rocks were stained orange from iron deposits I think.

After the falls we headed further into the town to go through the gold mining museum. It talked about the history of gold in the area and how it came to become an industrialized mine. There were also some amazing pieces of metalwork made from gold and a 20 kg gold brick that came about to be worth about 8.8 million US dollars.

After the gold mining museum we took a short drive to the town next door called Jioufen. We got dropped off next to a street market and we spent the next hour and a half to two hours walking through the street market looking for gifts, trying samples of food, and of course buying some food. One of the more interesting things we tried were these huge sea snails that were called Jade snails. Three grilled snails came to an order and they were cut up into four pieces each and each piece was a mouthful. The texture was a lot like a calamari steak or king trumpet mushrooms, which we also had grilled and fried, and the flavor of the snails was really subtle and mild. In addition to the snails and mushrooms we also got some fried chicken and a rice crepe that was stuffed with shaved candied peanuts, cilantro and vanilla ice cream.

When we finished with the market we walked around a little bit trying to figure out where to meet the van because the town was on a hillside and the streets were not real easy to navigate. Once we met up with the van we headed out to lunch in Keelung, which is a large port town, at a restaurant called Peng’s Agora Garden restaurant located inside of the Evergreen Laurel Hotel. Even though we were not very hungry we still ended up ordering a decent amount of food and of course we finished it all. We ended up having roast duck, 3 cup mushroom, General Tso’s chicken, stir-fried broccoli with gingko nuts, braised beef tendon with brown sauce, stir-fried eggplant with garlic and basil, sautéed Peng’s special bean curd, and steamed grouper. They were all really good, but I thought the best dish was the steamed grouper.

We rolled ourselves out of the restaurant and hotel and headed to the Yehliu Geopark, which has a lot of interesting stone formations that were carved out by the sea. Most of the rock formations looked like giant mushrooms coming up out of the ground, but some had an uncanny resemblance to other things. One of the most popular formations was the queen’s head rock that kind of reminded me of a picture I’ve seen of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti.

A few of my favorites were the candle rocks, Fairy’s shoe, and Earth rock. After taking a bunch of pictures of all the formations and walking around for a while we headed back to meet the van again.

Fairy's Shoe Rock & Earth Rock

From Yehliu we headed to the city of Tamsui and their new Fisherman’s Wharf. They built a tower there called the Lover’s tower and my parents bought Christal and me a ticket to ride up the rotating platform. When we rode up it was nice because there were no other people on it except us and the views from the top were pretty spectacular. After we finished the ride we walked around with everybody a little bit and took some pictures with the Lover’s Bridge in the background and then met back up with the bus.

The van took us into downtown Tamsui and dropped us off for the day. We headed down to the waterfront and walked along the bank of the river/ocean in the Tamsui Old Street Night Market. We got to taste a few more interesting things I hadn’t seen before. We had some Turkish ice cream, a huge green onion and 1,000 year old egg fried dumpling, taro soft serve, fried quail eggs, and lap chong sausage served inside a rice sausage with peanut powder, dried radish, pickled cabbage, gherkin, and ginger. The sausage inside a sausage was definitely a glutton’s paradise.

When we finished walking the night market and buying food and gifts we headed to the metro station to take the subway back to the hotel. After about a half hour in the hotel we met up and went downstairs for a late dinner in the restaurant. The restaurant was called La Brasserie, but they had some really good Asian food. Christal, Mom, Uncle Vic and Uncle Cliff ordered the beef noodle soup, Uncle Jim and I ordered the Hainanese chicken rice, Dad ordered the Singapore noodles and Auntie Shirley ordered angler fish with a cauliflower cream sauce.

After we finished Christal and I headed back to the room to pack up for the long trip back to Loma Linda.