Our flatmates were away to visit a friend so the GF and I returned to Yangminshan to tackle the stairs again. 1.6 kilometres, it turns out, equal about 160 flights of stairs if the iOS’s app is to be believed, though I’ve never really understood how it measures these things – surely changes in elevation would be more intuitive and align better with the real work where we are not taking the long way up skyscrapers?
I complained a lot all the way, but luckily it was a sunny but cool sort of day, much better than the hot and humid afternoon we’d last tried going up the stairs. There were plenty of people coming the other way – there are several other entrances and I think this might be the steepest climb of any of them, though all climb up into the hills. All of them were fully equipped for hikes as is usual in East Asia – technical clothing, sensible boots, hats, walking sticks or hiking poles. By contrast the GF and I were our usual scruffy under-equipped selves, though we were at least both wearing athleisure.
At the top of the stairs there was a rough path leading up a steep hill, so of course we went up there as well. It turned out to be quite steep, enough that on the way back there were a few points where I just sat down inched forward on my rear feeling like a toddler wearing a nappy. Eventually I realised that I was no longer in the Costa Rican rainforest where it seemed at times that every tree was poisonous and every insect deadly, so I let myself hold on to branches and made much more dignified progress.
At the top there was not much of a view but it was quite lovely nonetheless, with waves of mist breaking against the trees and stiff breeze it was hard to stand against. Someone had taken the effort to bring up a pair of plastic chairs, one pink and one blue, and carefully wedged them under a fallen branch so they wouldn’t blow away. I would not have done it myself but I quite liked the idea of an elderly Taiwanese couple bringing up the chairs so they could stop for little tea breaks during their weekend strolls.
Back to the foot of the hill and over a short of shoulder to reach the highlight of the walk – the Xiangtang crater. This was a small, round crater surrounded on all sides by densely wooded walls – near solid green except for the odd sakura in full bloom. The crater floor was a lush grassland that becomes a pond after heavy rain, when the shrimp that live in it come back to life for as long as water is there. Then the water sinks away and the shrimp go back to hibernation.
The wind was fierce here, swirling around the bowl of the crater and passing in heavy waves over the grass. At the centre of the grassland was a rock which someone had marked with a red swastika.
It was a magical spot, and suddenly the many firm warnings not to burn joss paper made sense.
We walked on towards Miantianping, a far gentler walk with ups and down along hillsides, over mossy stones and through bamboo groves. We arrived at the little pavilion of Miantianping where there were several people sitting around and having snacks (as an aside, it’s nice to be back in a part of the world where they take meals and snacks very seriously indeed). I realised with a start that no one was wearing masks, of course – the first such gathering I’d seen since arriving in Taiwan.
I looked around a bit for what one of the signboards said were the remains of prehistoric settlement but didn’t find it.
There was a path from here leading to a different exit and we decided to take it out of the park. On the way down (again, many stairs) we passed little farm plots and people selling oranges and ginger they’d just harvested. We bought ourselves a little bag of ginger, stopped at a tiny temple along the way to admire the view and then finally emerged onto a road. This was a tiny twisty road in what was once a village, with little houses tightly packed around it and almost no one around. We walked on, finding a convenient shortcut through fields in what looked like a public right of way (I hope), stopping once to buy some freshly squeezed orange juice. The road was not busy at all, and curved along the hillside with views over Tamsui so it was a very enjoyable 20-30 minutes till we returned to our flat where our flatmates had returned.