Sunset over the lake
Moonrise over a tea field
Blue green water
Sun Moon Lake, go there now! Everything is beautiful, easy and welcoming. It’s like moving the brightness slider up to eleven. It’s like landing in Oz after Kansas.
The little lake is a pool of blue green that I’ve never seen outside of tropical oceans. I’ll wildly guess the hue is the same Taiwan hydromagic that makes hot springs and jade-color rivers.
My indefatigable travel partner Emily and I checked it out the other weekend. The travel guides say it’s not-to-
Our room at the Apollo! Pic by Emily.
be-missed and loathe are we to miss anything. Well, Emily’s especially loathe. I don’t know how she’s been so many places in the time we’ve been here.
Anyhooz, we ditched class to catch a morning bus and four dozy hours later we arrived in time for a late lunch in Shueishe, a perfect little resort town of about three streets and hotels from cheap to elite.
Lunch was some resort-priced fried rice, followed by a stroll on the lake perimeter. And boy did it smell … wonderful! White ginger ringed the shore in our neighborhood. Nearly every nook and turn of the shore shelters a microclimate so thirty feet makes the difference between lush ginger or ferns or cork trees. Poke their trunks, it feels like a corkboard.
Shueishe was once one of Chaing Kai-shek’s many country retreats. We saw the Chaing Kai-shek rowboat and the Chaing Kai-shek guardhouse, now guarding the fortress-like wall of a swanky resort.
That evening, 
the entertainment just below our window most certainly felt familiar to the many, many mainland tourists. A rainbow light show on the dock.
Sun Moon Lake is hip to helping Chinese-speaking and Anglophone tourists both. The Shueishe tourist office is a sleek, newly-built little depot. They also speak killer English and will totally help you get a bus, bike, hotel, meal or whatevs.
Prayers hang in the wind at Wenwu Temple.
On our Saturday morning, a lean, beaming old man clad in cycling gear and high on endorphins greeted us at the tourist info desk. He had, literally minutes ago, finished the fifteen mile circuit of the lake and hardly had a bead of sweat on him. “It’ll be easy for you two,” he said.
Eh … I mentioned this place was in the mountains, right? Like, with slopes?
Golden phesants nosh
Okay, so we didn’t make it all the way around.
The story is: we had a wonderful trip anyway stopping at every attraction on the top half of the lake.
Temple-builders like Sun Moon Lake area because of the views from the mountaintops. The first stop on our bike tour was Wenwu Temple, sacred to Confucius, the gods of literature and war and others. Like at the Taipei Confucius Temple, people write prayers on little tablets and hang them in the wind.
A native Taiwanese
Ornithology, lepidopterology, both are at Sun Moon Lake. The ”Peacock Garden” pheasants sport colors that make you understand why beautiful birds are hunted to extention for their feathers. Further down the road, the China Youth Corps butterfly garden houses a collection of the insects living among lantana and scarlet milkweed. The island is a major stopover for migrating butterflies; there’s a highway in the south that closes a few weeks a year for the creatures to float across.
Below the butterfly garden lies the ersatz-aboriginie village of Ita Thao where Han people operate a delicisous street guantlet of Southeast Asia-esque dishes. I got a satay which had notes of the Indonesian/Malaysian in it. And I got a bamboo ketupat which, lo, when I cut it open had rice _and_ meat. We also got a fried sweet potato cake, something of fried millet, a pancake shaped like Spongbob Squarepants and also a Chinese empanada. We got back on our bikes, I with about a pint of hot grease stewing in my stomach. We’d gone about two miles.
I can maybe estimate how many people were cycling because it’s safe to assume all other cyclists passed us; somehow all the roads sloped up. There were a few orgainzied groups — tight maillots and all — of 20 or 30 folks. Plus numerous pods of families and friends. The road’s curvy, hilly and belongs to the bikes as much as the cars. Let’s say 200+ cyclists on a sunny weekend day.
Yet not all of them stopped everywhere like we did, not even at the temple for the guy who brought Buddhism to China. Syuentzang Temple honors the scholar Syuentzang whose travels to India in the 600s became 1,000 years later the novel Journey to the West. It’s a Chinese classic and it adds a kid-friendly fierce fighting monkey and a shape-shifting pig to the monk’s legendary entourage. A relic of Syuentzang is on display.
Chiang Lao Ma
The road tops out at a pagoda sacred to, well, Chaing Kai-shek’s mother of all people. He was able to see the monument to his own filial piety from his redoubt across the lake.
The pagoda is 1,000 feet above sea level; I felt like we’d yes, pedaled at least that far upward. The additional nine stories of pagoda were worth it:
Atop the pagoda
But the biggest payoff? About a one mile high-speed coast back down the mountain! Whoo hoo!
Oh, and we caught a tourist boat at the bottom which ferried us right back to our hotel. We encountered a real staring culture carrying our bikes through the throngs of tourists on the docks. You’d have thought we were Ladies Godiva … or Hesters. Or tatooed cartoon aborigines with spikes through our lips and hair tied up with bones. Whew!
I don’t remember where we went for dinner after that or what we talked about. I just remember green and blue and clear, clean air. Sun Moon Lake: A+
That lake look really nice. Wonder why it never quite make an impression on me 13 years ago when we stopped there for R&R? Might be the late nights at the clubs in Taichung. Looks like I missed out on this one.
WOW!!! Sun Moon Lake sounds like it was well worth the trip. I would love to “go there now”! Got the passport, not the money or time off. Love the pic looking out the window at the lake. I can just imagine myself there. Not too sure about the bike riding, especially down the mountain. I can’t wait to hear all about it in person.
Love,
Aunt Deb