20160514汐止秀峰瀑布

On mother’s day, Taipei seems to me like an empty town again as mostly people are coming back home to spend time with their dear moms. I was going to stay in my tiny room and watch bunch of movies then call it a day, but Amy randomly threw this idea of going mountain climbing at Xizhi while we were having dinner with Terumi and others from Mengyen family. We came to a consensus very quickly, we were praying the weather would be good. Not to our disappointment, the sunlight came creeping in my room, I had a feeling that today will be very exciting. Amy invited her cousin, Orika, to join the trip. So here we go! 2 locals plus 2 Japanese, I knew this could be a lot of fun!

We planned to take bus F911 to TianShiu Temple but we missed it, and it would take another 90 min. until the next came, that’s why we grabbed taxi instead. It was raining when we reached there, luckily it didn’t last long. There were not many tourists, I guess people prefer to go somewhere less energy-consuming on this day which is good for us, this way we don’t have to worry about not being able to take good photos.

The path was pretty easy, we only spent half an hour to get to the scenic spot called 秀峰瀑布 (Shuifeng Waterfall). I saw river shrimps and some small fish swimming freely there, the sunbeam penetrated through the tree and illuminated our skins, very joyful. Along the trail, the tong flower petals scattered naturally on the stone ladders, absolutely breath taking. The tong blossoms were simply more spectacular than most of the tourist attractions.

For our lunch, there is this 100% vegetarian restaurant- 珍饌玉膳. All the staffs have the same religion 一貫道, it’s very interesting to see their welcoming us visiting, even their hands were full dealing with over 100 customers, they wanted to know more about us. Because we are, as they said, the very few youngsters who eat vegetarian foods. In fact, it is because there is no other choice for us, ha-ha. We got extra dishes from them, I felt very grateful.

After the meal, we kept climbing up the hill toward the peak of 四分子尾山 (Sifenziwei Mount.). it is quite a distance, the height is 641M, again, we didn’t run into any other climbers along the way.

It’s really hard to catch a bus to go down to the city so Terumi called her husband to drive us. Then we headed back home after dinner.

I had a fantastic day today, we all enjoyed the time and I hope this is the first of the many to come ‘cause there are many more mountains for us to conquer in the future! 

(From left to right) Amy, Terumi, Orika