Tao-Mi Ecological Village
This is where we went camping on the November 8th, 2003 weekend. It is located near Puli, which is up in the mountains towards the middle of the island.
On the way there we stopped at a place that had a big patch of grass. The Taiwanese really like patches of grass because they rarely see them, so they usually pose for a picture in front of it. This is the family who took me camping: (L to R) Apple, me, Momo, and Judy (the girls' mother).
This is the Caonan Sianjinggu Wetlands. There were bamboo bridges built by the people living in the area, as well as a dragonfly pulley swing. This area of Taiwan has many species of frog and dragonfly.
And don't ask me what's going on here....
We also did a small hike to the Shueshang Waterfalls. The hike started by a lemon tree and betel palm tree field and went through a bamboo forest.
The bamboo was interesting because it sheds these strange large shingles. I don't know how to describe it, but here's a picture.
And after a short time, we made it to the waterfall.
Beautiful plants and trees were everywhere. The left picture is of Eucalyptus trees, and the right is of Betel Palm trees. There were beautiful wild flowers everywhere too.
The place we camped at is called Yen's Pasture Family. As you can see, it wasn't exactly roughing it, as we had a shelter and our site was on cement and springy boards. It was a very nice place and the people who work there speak english! I think we'll go back there sometime.
And of course there was a massive BBQ (with more BBQing stations than this one), where you can cook your own veggies, tofu, squid, pork, fish, etc (basically everything). By the way, this is exactly what barbequeing in Taiwan looks like- they don't actually have barbeques to cook on- they have these disposable wire racks and they load some charcoal into a tire rim and light it on fire. It works quite well, you can have many barbequeing stations all over the place, and everyone sits around on those little stools and eats!
And no one can call themselves prepared for camping without packing a laptop, projection screen, and projector to show movies all night!
