Dongshan District, Tainan

Transcription

Hello everybody! Welcome to Travel in Taiwan. My name is Johan and I'm going to show you some pictures of a hot-spring town called Guanziling today. If you don't know where Guanziling is, let me show you on Google Map. Here we have Taiwan. If you don't know where Taiwan is, it's in Asia, here you see China, Japan and here are the Philippines. So we are based in Taipei in the north of Taiwan, and Guanziling is all the way down here, around here. So it's in southern Taiwan and it's close to the city of Chiayi which is about here. Can't see the name. But it's part of Tainan City, which is around here. Tainan City. How did we get there? We took... Let me first show you how far it is. It's 304 kilometers. It's about 300 kilometers from Taipei to Guanziling and it takes about more than three hours by car. This time we didn't take the car, but we took the high-speed rail, which also follows the western coast. All the way down here. The nearest high-speed railway station to Guanziling is Chiayi. And the station is outside Chiayi City and the high-speed railway station is at Taibao, which is about here. So how did we get from the station to Guanziling, which is here? There are a few options. There is no direct bus, public bus from here to here. So if you want to take the bus, you have to first take the shuttle bus to Chiayi City. Oh, first let me show you the information about the high-speed rail. If you take the high-speed rail from Taipei to Chiayi at 8 o'clock, you will arrive at Chiayi at 9:24, so it's one hour and 24 minutes. And it costs you 1,180 NT dollars. If you take the conventional train, you can do that as well, from Taipei to Chiayi. You leave at 8 and you'll arrive at 11:30. So it's 3 hours and 30 minutes. Two hours more than the high-speed rail, and it will cost you 600, that's half the price. Like I said, from the high-speed railway station to Guanziling, there is no bus. So you have to take the bus first to downtown Chiayi. Actually to the railway station there. And you can do this by using the THSR shuttle bus, which is free. You just have to show your train ticket, and it takes about half an hour to go to downtown Chiayi. In Chiayi you can take the bus, you can take the bus from Chiayi to Guanziling. And I show you the bus company's website. There is no English here. You have different bus routes here. And the one to Guanziling is this one, it's number 7214. Chiayi to Guanziling. Let me open it and show you. Buses leave on top of the hour or each hour, 7, 8, 9 and so on, and here you can see quite a lot of stops. I don't know exactly how long it takes, probably about an hour or maybe 40 or maybe 50 minutes. And it will cost you, if you look here, the price list, this is Chiayi, and this is Guanziling. So it's 93 Taiwan dollars, which is about 3 bucks US. If you don't want to take the bus and if you want to make it quicker, you can do what we did, we went, we took the high-speed rail to the high-speed railway station and just took a taxi from there to Guanziling. There are taxis waiting outside and you have to negotiate the price. I think they will ask for 800 NT-Dollar and I think we agreed on 700 or something like that. The taxi will go from here to Guanziling across... They will take some minor roads here and they will pass the town of Baihe. Baihe is here. This is an interesting place. They have a lot of lotus flower fields, which is quite nice in the summer. Let me show you how it looks. Those are beautiful lotus flowers. They have a lot of lotus flower fields, and actually you can sit on those leaves, if you are not too heavy. And they do have a flower festival, a lotus flower festival during the summer. Let's go back to the map. The map is here. So, you pass Baihe, and then you come to the Guanziling area. This is plains. The flatlands, the area of Guanziling is quite hilly, those are the foot hills of the central mountains. And Guanziling is here and it's in a small valley. Let me show you some pictures. It's not really a very attractive for my taste, a very attractive village in terms of architecture and buildings. They have a little stream here, they tried to make it prettier by building this kind of walkways, and you have a bridge over the highway here, where you can go from the lower section of Guanziling to the higher section, upper section, where you have more hotels and... this is the older part of town where you can see some of the older hot-spring hotels, which have been around for quite a long time. You can see the different spellings of Kuan Tzu Ling, Guanziling. This a very old house, probably built during the Japanese... the early 20th century, by the Japanese. And have a look here. They have a bridge over the river. We did look around a bit, but then it was time to have lunch, and for lunch we went to a restaurant called Top Rock. Let me show you the map where it is. This is the Guanziling area. And the restaurant where we had lunch is about here, this one. So from here, the main area, if you walk, it's like 10-15 minutes. And if you want to have a look, how it looks on Street View. Have a look. It's somewhere, you come up here, this highway, the 175. There is a bend in the road and the restaurant is hidden behind those trees. Let me show you some pictures. It's the Rock Top, Top Rock or Rock Top? Rock Top restaurant. You can see the entrance and here it says, they have chicken. G means chicken. And afternoon tea and you go in there, very lovely place. "We are in business" "Ying ya zhong" Then we met this guy. This is the owner, it's not a gangster, he looks a bit, but he's very friendly. And he introduced us to the dishes on the menu. We first had some refreshing juice, and then we had this one, a vegetable dish, and then we had some sausages. Very nice. And then, this was the best part of the meal, free-range chicken, from a farm in the area. Very delicious, tender meat. Very flavorful, really great, great stuff. The area around Guanziling is also known as coffee country. They have coffee plantations there, and they actually use the coffee beans to make soup. You see, those are coffee beans and it's very strong flavored chicken soup. And we also had this very delicious pork. Here you can see all the dishes at once. And you sit in this kind of simple dining room, the windows are open and you can see outside, it's green and very nice. And they also have a coffee shop place. And the people there are very friendly. And they have this old car, from the, I don't know, from the '50s or maybe from the '60s. Then we went on to do some sightseeing around Guanziling. Let's go back to the map. It's slow, the computer. Here is the restaurant, and we went further down, the 175. It becomes 172, not 72. And there is a place called the Guanziling "Shui Huo Tong Yuan", and that translated it means Water Fire Spring. Let's see it on Google Street View. Let's see what it looks like. Should be here. You see, here's the highway. And it is just down here somewhere. You go down here. There are stairs. Let me show you how it looks. Let me show you some photos. "Shui Huo Tong Yuan". There is no English here. It means Water and Fire Spring. You go down there, and that's basically it. It's a very small place. There you can see the fire coming out of the wall. Some gas coming out there, and someone must have ignited it. And they have water there. So, fire coming out of the water. And you see there is some very old plate there, and the fire is burning all the time, even during heavy rain. Even during typhoons. And this is the owner of the restaurant where we had lunch and this young lady drove us around. She is from the Siraya National Scenic Area, which Guanziling is part of. So we had a car and were driven around. That was very nice. Some more photos. There are some eateries down there, you can see, you can have noodles, rice, rice noodles, bamboo tube rice, and stinky tofu, very important. Then we went to another place. This one to have coffee. Let's go back to the map. So, no no no no... From the Fire and Water spring we went further down here the road to the Guanziling Biyun Temple. There is a temple there, a very nice one. If you have time to look around and if you have means of transport, because there is no public transport, it's very good idea to take this road here to go to the Biyun Temple. And the temple looks like... Let me show you. Biyun Temple is here. It's actually a very pretty temple. It looks like this. Very old. It looks a bit like it could be in Mainland China, for me at least. It's called Biyun Temple, the "Temple of the Azure Clouds". You can see nice temple art. Dragons up there and I don't know who this is. Maybe can check it out online. Phoenix and dragons. And those are very cute lions in front of the entrance. There is one on the left and one on the right side. We made photos here. And I like this temple quite a lot. Then we went on. We took the car back here, went here, and then went down the 175. And the 175 is known as "Coffee Road" because there are a lot of coffee plantations on the side of the road. Let me show you some pictures online. The area is called Dongshan, and it's the Dongshan Coffee Road. And you have quite a few... looks like this. Very hilly place and the roads are very nice, if you like bicycling and you don't mind to cycle up and down the hills, it's a great place to have fun on bicycles, and there you can sit, there are a lot of coffee shops with nice views and we went to one that's called... this one. So, it's called Hoe vs. Flower. There is no English here, but it's called Hoe vs Flower and I show you pictures. This is the path up to the coffee shop, and they have very nice lamp shades. Colorful and cute, and you see a lot of flowers and stuff like that. Welcome. You can sit outside under trees when the weather is nice. The owner did make this all himself. And here he is, the owner, a very nice guy. If you sit there and talk to him, he will tell you a lot about his own story. He did work in the big city once, in a publishing company, and then decided it was enough and he went back to the country side, where he did work as a pig farmer, but then he didn't like it anymore and he opened this coffee shop, in the middle of nowhere, basically. It's really up in the hills somewhere along the highway. He likes his coffee very much and he can tell you a lot about coffee beans and what he likes about coffee. Here you can see coffee beans. Very friendly guy. And this is how he makes the coffee, very strong and aromatic. Very nice guy. His customer love it. And you can sit outside here, this is the wooden deck, they have a nice Golden Retriever as well, a friendly dog. And even if it's raining you can go there and sit inside and enjoy the nice views of the hills. And if you wonder how far it is away from New York for example, here you can see New York, 12,000 kilometers. A very nice coffee shop called Hoe vs Flowers. Then we finally went back to Guanziling to actually do what we came for and that is taking a hot-spring bath. We went back and the place we did stay is this hotel, called the King's Garden Villa. Just to show you... they have a website, they say, there's an English version, but it doesn't really work for me. So I just show you a basic room here. It starts at 5,000 NT dollar and goes up to 9,000 for a Honeymoon Room. Let me show you pictures. The King's Garden Villa. We came there in the late evening, so it was dark already. That's how it looks in the evening. This is the lobby and this was our room, very simple, but not cheap, the beds are very comfortable and what's good about every room in this hotel is the bathroom. You can take your private hot-spring bath, very clean and comfortable. And that's how it looks in the morning. They have these white wooden buildings. This is the main building and they have smaller ones where you have the guestrooms. Very clean, spotless clean and very nice attention to detail. Here you have a coffee shop and this is the lobby again. It's a bit like a small village. We had breakfast here. This is open and you can see, take the breakfast there and see the mountains and they make omelets there. And then we checked out a few other rooms. This is one, a suite where you have American country house style going on. Very clean and modern, very comfortable, very nice if you want to go for a weekend. Here you can see a nice bathroom again. And then we went... This is the bedroom. And then we went to the public bath area. They have this kind of cave theme. There you can see the pools there, and the temperature, 40 degrees. There were other people there and you see the water is gray. Guanziling has, the soil is, they have this gray mud, which is supposed to be good for your skin. We did take a dip there and then we relaxed on the chairs there. And you can see the temperature. 39 degrees. Very pleasant. And this is actually a Chinese medicine bath. Very strong smell, also supposed to be good for you. And they also have water jets where you can massage yourself. And they have a very lovely pool, just a normal pool, no hot-spring water. And it's a very relaxing place. It's not cheap but very nice. Then we went to a second place. We visited two places, and the second place is called the Toong Mao Hot Spring Resort, something like that. And they do have an English website, but it's not very good, so just to give you an idea what the room rates are. It starts at 3,200 per night, a very simple room and then goes up to 8,000 for a VIP room. And we also made pictures here. Let me show you. One room. We didn't sleep there, we just checked out the rooms. Very basic, but has all the things you need. On the balcony they have a very small area where you can take a hot spring bath, which we did. Hot water, cold water, and you take a bath from 9 to midnight. If you stand up you can look here, you can see some of the scenery outside. And they do have a public area as well. This is a swimming pool. And they have a hot-spring area here, and they do also have this muddy water, gray muddy water, and they supply the mud. You can put it on and and enjoy it. Which we did, we had some fun there. And we really did enjoy our hot-spring bathing there. We really love hot springs. And that was already the last... This is already the last picture. We really enjoyed... We just spent one day there in Guanziling and we had fun. If you want to read more about Guanziling and the area, you can go to our website, which should be opening in a minute. Yah, here This was the November/December issue of 2012. You can see here. Oh, my computer is dying right now. You can see, here we have a website where you can read all issues online, starting with Those are the latest issues. The computer is really slow right now. OK, starting with the first issue here. May/June 2010 and then the issue with the article about Guanziling, November/ December 2012 and now we are at March already, March 2014. And if you click here, you don't need to register, you just go there and click on it. It will load, hopefully soon. Travel in Taiwan No. 45 There you can see the issue loading and you can see here, they have an overview. The article is here. And there you can read about.., actually not only Guanziling but the Siraya National Scenic Area and Chiayi City. So we did also go to other places there and you can read about it. The computer is very slow today. Another option you have, if you want to read about Taiwan is and if you have an iPad you can actually download the Travel in Taiwan magazine iPad app, and that's at the iTunes store. And here you can see it. Just go to iTunes and look for Travel in Taiwan. And you can download the app free of cost, and it's nice because you can see more pictures there, and if you want to read more about us and Travel in Taiwan, you can go to our Facebook page. Deng, deng, deng... And here we have it. We have a Facebook page with updates about what's going on in Taiwan, if you are interested. That's about it. Thank you very much for watching and hopefully..., ah, btw. All the links to the websites I have opened in this video, I will put under this video in the descriptions below this video on Youtube. Thanks for watching and see you again soon.