Day trip to Taiwan's Northern Coast

It's the American Thanksgiving weekend, so we have a four-day weekend. We spent Thursday riding bikes to DaJi (大直) and Friday running errands. Nick went on a church retreat on Friday night with his pastor and friends from the Taipei International Church youth group and won't return until Sunday. So, it's just the three of us to go on our road-trip to Taiwan's northern coast.
The weather is perfect today. It's sunny, dry and cool, at around 15-20 degrees Celsius. We left our apartment at around 9am and drove towards Shanji (三芝). Enroute, we saw an interesting place called, Miss Olive's. It's just off the beach of Chan-sui-wan (淺水灣) and has a wonderful view of the Taiwan Strait. It is a fancy bed-and-breakfast/bar/restaurant about an hour from Taipei. It looked really interesting, so we stopped and parked our car to take a closer look. Unfortunately, we walked in at around 10:30am and the place was not officially open. Clearly, there weren't any overnight guests today, but it looked like it had a busy Friday night. There were quite a few dirty glasses still on the bar and a BBQ grill that saw some recent activities.

Our next stop was the Gunde Water-wheel park (根德水車園區) which showed a working model of a "water wheel." This is to illustrate how irrigation is done in this area. The park is not yet fully furnished but it is quite pretty. By this time, we were beginning to feel a little hungry and wanted something to eat. The first interesting place we saw was the Shimen (石門) county agriculture coop. It featured local produce as well as sticky-rice dumplings (粽子). Between the three of us, we tried one "northern" and one "southern" dumpling and agreed that the southern one tasted better. The northern one was tasty, but it was a little dry. The southern version was sticky and gooey as well as full of flavours. At NTD35 each or NTD100 for three, it's a good buy. About 100 meters further, we saw a huge crowd outside another roadside shop also selling dumplings. It's the Liu Family (劉家) dumpling shop. This place has been recommended by TV shows and newspaper, so there were a lot of tourists out front. We stopped our car and sampled one northern and one southern dumpling at this shop as well. While the northern version was better this time, more moist and flavourful, the southern one was a little bland.

After the snacking we've done, we decided to visit check out Shanji. After visiting the tourist information (a beautiful building on the hills of Shanji), we decided that the only place we were interested in visiting was a ceramic art studio. Unfortunately, the studio was closed and would not open until 1 or 2pm. So, we set off to our next destination, Jingshan (金山).

While we have driven past Jingshan several times, we have never stopped there. We decided to visit the old street (老街) and check out the shops and restaurants. Unfortunately, the old street here is not too different from old streets in the other parts of Taiwan. The street is filled with vendors of various food items including peanuts, preserved olives, candies, toys,..etc. The local specialty is the sweet potatoes and you can see it (in various forms) offered ever so often along the old street. About half way down the old street, you will see a huge crowd of people. Many of these people will be running around with one or two plates of freshly cooked food. This is the famous duck restaurant in front of the Guan-an Temple (廣安宮). This is truly an amazing place. All together, there are around eight or ten (or more) places with tables and chairs around Guan-an Temple where people would sit and eat. The would go to the duck shop to get their boiled duck (NTD120 per plate of about half a duck), then go to Guan-an Temple to get freshly cooked seafood, vegetables, soup, fried noodles,..etc. There must be over 20 varieties of dishes to choose from. Since we were there at peak lunch time hour (around 12:45), the place was packed. There were people 3-4 deep, waiting to grab food that just came off the wok. Since we have been snacking, we just took a plate of duck, a plate of duck gizzards (heart, I think) and a plate of fried noodles. In terms of taste, the duck was very good and cheap. The gizzard was interesting with somewhat chewy texture but the noodles were tasteless. It would be better if we had come with more people so that we could try a few more dishes. It is very cheap and worth visiting again with a larger group. Matthew was hoping to find souvenir but wasn't able to find anything worth buying. Felicia, however, shopped and bought a couple of kilograms of sweet potatoes to take home.

After eating, we decided to go for a hike in the nearby Lion Head Hill (獅頭山). It is about a 5 minute drive from the Jingshan Old Street. The hike we took was about 1 km from the parking lot to the top of the hill where we could have a great view of the "Twin Candle Stick rock" (燭台雙嶼) in the middle of Pacific Ocean. There were a lot of rock formations down by the beach and Matthew was able to demonstrate his amazing rock climbing skills to us during our hike. We hiked for about an hour before turning back and return home to Taipei.