Sun Moon Lake
On Saturday, December 27th, Mark and I cruised out to Sun Moon Lake on our scooters. It took between 1.5 - 2 hours to get there from Yuanlin and our butts were sore. Sun Moon Lake is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Taiwan - though calling anything a 'tourist destination in Taiwan' sounds really funny to me :)
Here is Mark driving ahead on his scooter. We drove most of the way on the shoulder of the highway, and going through tunnels was quite exciting.
We saw this content looking guy fishing in a river along the highway. The winter flowers here are beautiful!
Here are some more beautiful winter plants in the mountains, including real-life WILD poinsettias!
At last! We made it to Sun Moon Lake!
First we went to the Dragon Pheonix temple. Not surprisingly, it had a phoenix, and a dragon.
Here is the front of the temple:
and this is the view of Sun Moon Lake through the temple gates.
This is an intricate stove used for burning ghost money
I couldn't resist taking a shot of this cute little guy on the temple roof:
And this is inside the Dragon Phoenix temple:
Next we went to the Massive Wen Wu temple. It was huge!
The lake was actually quite big, and it took a while to drive around. Here are a couple of shots we took while driving around the lake.
This is another temple around the lake, called the Hsuan Chuang temple. It was a little more quaint than the others and had tall trees.
Gimme a kiss!
And the sun was already starting to set around 4pm. After climbing up many steps, we made it to this beautiful pagoda called Tzuen Pagoda (many more steps to get to the top of the actual pagoda!)
We watched the sun set from the top of the pagoda.
After that, the sun had set. We even went to one more temple, but we couldn't easily take photos because it was dark. We made our way back in the 'freezing cold' to Yuanlin.