Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Guguan

Last Sunday, after spending Saturday in Yingge, we drove over to the hot-springs town of Guguan for another day of exploring with Brett. After orienting ourselves at the visitor center we went on a hike on the Siaolai (I also saw it spelled Shaolai) trail. The hike was short, and pretty steep, but we were rewarded at the top when we were invited (maybe we invited ourselves?) to sit with three men and share their tea and snacks.



After our fill of tea and peanuts we headed down to find some hot springs. There are many hotels with public access to their hot spring bathing pools; we chose Four Seasons after our new tea friends told us it was one of the cheapest (though still too expensive in their minds at $350NT). Swim caps are required in Taiwan so most of the other people had their own from home. Many of the women even had swim caps that matched their suits. We were not that prepared. "Luckily" the hotel gave us shower caps so we could enter the pools, as if we didn't stick out enough already. The pool area had multiple pools of varying temperatures. One man motioned that Jeremiah should follow him to another pool. We watched the man jump in, so Jeremiah did the same. The pool was freezing compared to the pool we had just come from and the man got a good chuckle to see Jeremiah's face as he popped out of the water.

I didn't take my camera into the pool area, but found the below shots from this site.

This pool had tiny fish that nibble the dead skin on your feet - gross but of course we tried it



We had a great meal and then headed back home, about a 1.5 to 2 hour drive to Taichung. Now that we have gotten out of the city a bit, we are looking forward to doing more exploring of Taiwan. And I'm sure we will find our way back to Guguan sometime soon.

3 comments:

  1. i want to do all these things with you in a couple weeks.

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  2. That place looked beautiful! I'm glad you guys are having such a great time

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  3. What a great day! It was so awesome to soak and hike at Guguan with you guys!!!

    My feet still tickle when I think about those fish.

    I thought those 3 nice folks we had tea and snacks with were 2 guys and a woman.

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