Day 4 of our trip to Taiwan consists of 2 locations this time, that being a visit to Sun Moon Lake and then the nearby Formosan Aboriginal Culture Village (What a mouthful) before heading back to our accommodation. All of our travel today will revolve around Nantou County and primarily the Cultural Village and its attached theme park (Yes. Theme Park). Enjoy!
Note: This is an excerpt from THIS post, hence the Day count
Read to know more about our 7D6N trip to Taiwan and the other days we stayed 🙂
Destination 1 – Sun Moon Lake
Another 2 hour drive from our previous accomodation at Flower Home, Sun Moon Lake is located in the Yuchi Township of Nantou County. As you could probably derive from the name, Sun Moon Lake is a rather large body of water. Specifically, we visited the Ita Thao Shopping District before headed for the cable car.
I dont know what constitutes an Old Street and what constitutes a Shopping District. To be honest, I had totally expected this to be an Old Street given its nature, but according to old Google, it’s not. Fair play to it for being different I suppose. There wasnt much to talk about here and, given the long nature of our second destination, I’ll choose to breeze past this
Destination 2 – Formosan Aboriginal Culture Village
Oh boy. I am excited for this.
Before we begin to dive into Taiwan’s one of if not Taiwan’s most popular theme park, we have to discuss how to get there. That all begins with the affectionately named Sun Moon Lake Cable Car Station, a 4 minute drive from the Ita Thao Shopping District. A $12-$18 ticket depending on the website you depend on is your gateway to the ultimate destination, the Formosan Aboriginal Culture Village or FACV for short
Despite it’s name, the FACV is partly cultural education and mostly entertainment. That is not to deny the insight it brings to the Taiwanese traditional tribal lifestyle and aboriginal traditions, however. The land it sits on and the country of Taiwan itself is steeped in centuries of history best observed by visiting yourself. After all, I can only bring you so much through blog format. Me personally, I do recommend this destination most out of every one we went to. Its an extremely interesting learning experience paired with a frankly great theme park afterwards.
The Aboriginal Village Park is a peek into the centuries of culture and traditions of Taiwan, i.e the first part of the village. The “Amusement Isle” is where the theme park is at consisting of the tallest free-fall ride in Taiwan as well as Taiwan’s largest European Gardens and bell tower. People will tell you Wikipedia is a bad source but I totally disagree.
Accomodation – Cingjing Yishan Wuling B&B
After a one hour fifteen minute drive from FACV, we reach our accomodation in the Ren’ai Township of Nantou County. On Google Maps, it has a pretty damn long name in Chinese so I slipped it into Translate and shortened it to the best of my ability. Name aside, the hotel is a comfy Bed&Breakfast located high in the mountains of Nantou, specifically chosen for an early morning trip we have into the mountains to watch the sun rise tomorrow
Even if you don’t have plans to head further up, the hotel is very comfortable and small. We stayed in the Quadruple Room with Balcony according to, yet again, Agoda. The view was nice and the breakfast was about as Taiwanese as you could get with whatever dishes they had available. Oh, and they have a cute dog.
Conclusion – Preparation for Tomorrow
Wow. I’m starting to get self-conscious if I’m missing anything with how short these posts are getting 🙁
Day 4 is, yet again, a rather short day to write about. We did tons at the Aboriginal Culture Village including enjoying the performances, touring the Village and hopping on some of the rides. If you’re more theme-park-inclined than we are, you could most definitely spend a whole day touring the FACV and Sun Moon Lake if you wished. Besides, by the time we finished, night had already began to fall anyways.
As I mentioned before when talking about the B&B, we had planned an early morning trip up to the mountains to watch the sun rise. I’ll elaborate more about it in the next post but the trip entailed waking up at 3am and dealing with single-digit temperatures… hurray? I do genuinely recommend doing what we did… it was well worth it… but I’ll leave it for next post so I can bait your click.
Make sure to refer to the post link HERE to have a look at the other days we stayed during our 7D6N trip to Taiwan. That’s all from me, make sure to drink your food and eat your water.