As expected, my plan to stay to myself whilst at Sun Moon Lake failed.
On Thursday we left at around lunchtime, taking bento boxes with us to eat on the train. I had Spanish in the morning – a good lesson and I’m enjoying the book – so it was an early start for me, but all things considered I was quite looking forward to the trip, as it’s always nice to get out of the routine. On the high-speed train I took out my bento box and put it on the tray, when a conductor materialised – it turns out that it is prohibited to eat on the train, as that entails removing one’s face mask. I really should have thought of it, I suppose, so oh well.
An uneventful train journey followed and we arrived in Taichung around three, where we ate our lunch whilst waiting for the bus. Then the bus – a frigid bus, mostly empty since it was not yet the weekend, through what very swiftly became countryside, with lush ricefields and orchards, and later, Taiwan’s short, sharp hills coated in palms, then bamboo, streaked with pines.
It took about 90 minutes to arrive at Sun Moon Lake. I am finding wearing masks on buses quite difficult, it is a recipe for car sickness for me, and this was as much as I could bear. The lake itself must once have been very beautiful: vivid blue-green under a clear sky, set amidst green hills. We arrived at the ‘sun’ part of the lake, the larger rounder lobe, thickly encrusted with hotels, but happily quite localised. Nevertheless the lake, at least the sun part of it, has the usual problem I am finding in Taiwan’s beauty spots, namely a sort of tameness. Even when tasteful, and when there are few people around, one never feels far from concrete. To be fair, though, Sun Moon Lake is one of the most popular spots so in some ways it exceeded our expectations.
Our hotel was on the moon side of the lake, so we caught a taxi to take us. It ripped us off, this being a tourist trap sort of place, but eventually we arrived at our rather lovely lodgings: a set of five wooden huts, spotlessly clean, with a tatami platform for the bed, a soaking bath, and a little antechamber set with a tea table – Chinese style, with floor cushions, one of those tea trays that you pour the lees into, etc. Outside the huts was a little cafe in a wooden hut which could have come from a Miyazaki film, and over on side was the low white three-sided house of the owners, set around a courtyard where they served dinner and breafast. It’s an old house, so the central room was the family altar, and there were a couple of intriguing bits of farm machinary in the courtyard, as well as a panting pug.
To one side a green hillside ran steeply up, to the other it fell away to a farming valley. The lake itself was just around the hillside so not in view, but it was a lovely setting.
On arrival the GF and I went to walk away the journey and found ourselves going steeply up a hillside, along sharp switchbacks, until we arrived at a pavilion with a view over the little valley on one side, and on the other a path that fell downwards to the lakeside. This was a very small lobe of a lobe of the lake, so it felt quite wild and empty other than a couple of fishermen.
We had dinner in the courtyard – fairly ordinary, but it felt nicely homecooked at least, and then coffee at the hut where mine, to universal delight, came out in a cup shaped like Totoro.