Yangmingshan & Maokong Gondola

Met up with my friend Jessie this morning and headed north to Yangmingshan National Park to check out the flower festival. The flowers were pretty, but the waterfall was the best part. Would be a great place to have a picnic on a nice day. After walking through the park we headed back into town to grab lunch at one of the night markets. Unfortunately the market wasn't open yet, so we stopped at a kind of outdoor food court to grab something to eat. I tried a fried egg and oyster dish (tasted a lot better than it looked) and finally tried the infamous chou dofu, or stinky tofu, which is a popular treat in Taiwan. The smell is unpleasant, but the taste isn't bad and it has a really nice texture for tofu.

After that headed to the Maokong Gondola which runs through the hills in southern Taipei. I'd heard of the gondola and thought it was just a short ride to the top of a hill, but turns out it's about 2.5 miles each way as the gondolas go up and down the hills into the tea growing area of Maokong. I wasn't able to get any good pictures of the hillside, but it was kind of like floating over a jungle - very dense greenery everywhere you looked.