Monday 28 October, 2024

Taichung is Taiwan’s second largest City. It has a population of 2.85 million people in an area of 163.4 square metres. I am not sure what that equates to in density per person, but surprisingly it does not feel as chaotic as Hanoi. 

There is a lot of new building and large hi-rises. As usual on our rest day we explore the Cities we are staying in and boy did we explore. We walked over 11.5 kms, so much for a rest day.

I had read about the calligraphy park and the Botanical Park. Also, the rainbow village and the Earthquake Museum.  We can visit the rainbow village and the earthquake museum on our way out of Taichung on Wednesday.

After breakfast we followed google maps to the calligraphy park. Although this is not Dovedale, Derbyshire there are stepping stones and I am crossing them.  I am safe crossing them as I do not have brother Richard trying to push me in the river. To explain to non-family members my Mum and Dad used to take us (Richard, Joy and me) to Derbyshire for Sunday walks. There is one area that we loved and it had rock stones in the river that you could walk across. Of course, big brother would always try to push little sister into the water. He didn’t always win, but more often than not one of us ended up going home wet. This pathway is called the Lunchtime River Walk.

I am not sure that we got to the correct Calligraphy greenway. We only spotted a couple of stone sculptures.

However, in that area we came across a few sculptures in a park.

We followed them down the tree-lined park area and came across more and more sculptures. They were fantastic. We had stumbled across the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts outside sculpture park. We spent hours and took lots of photos of the sculptures.

The National Museum of Fine Arts was built in 1988 and has an exhibition space of 102,000 square metres of indoor exhibition space and outdoor sculpture park. The museums main building has a total floor area of 37,953 square metres. Unfortunately, it is closed on Monday, as are most of the museums in Taichung. We really enjoyed the time we spent in this area.

We then headed up to the Botanical Gardens and Natural Science Museum. Again, the Natural Science Museum was closed. I only wanted to wander around the Botanical Gardens, and I knew we could do that.  The botanical gardens were set up so  that you could experience all areas of Taiwan’s flora and fauna in one area. They created areas of the park that represented the lowlands of Taiwan, the mountainous areas and the coastal area. There was one area which was closed and that was the main rain-forest area, which was in the greenhouse.

Ralf spotted this Black-Crowned Night Heron. He had his camera with him and got a pretty good picture of it.

We had a wonderful day and wandered back to our hotel by 3:00 p.m. I was able to update the blog.

We are leaving Taichung on Wednesday and although we still have plenty of cash, Ralf was concerned about running out of cash in a semi-rural area. I had researched that it was cheaper to get cash from an ATM at a 7/11 than at a bank.  On our walk-about today we went into a bank. The ATM switched to English as soon as Ralf put in his card (clever) and before we confirmed the transaction it indicated that there would be 4% charge on the transaction. We cancelled the transaction and went into a 7/11, the charge was $4.00 Cdn. A lot less than 4%.

After dinner, at a Vietnamese restaurant, we headed back to the hotel and prepared for our trip to Sun Moon Lake.