I'm almost done travelling in Taiwan.

I know that's kind of a weird thing to say. Can you ever really be "done" travelling somewhere? Unless it's you've been to every city and seen every sight, there's always more to do. But minus me finding any new things to spark my interest, I only have two places on the island I want to see. And who knows, I may knock those out in a week or so.

My trip today was up the north coast of the island, wrapping around to Keelung, or by it's correct pinyin name, Jilong. Get your shit together and decide on a consistent romanization method, Taiwan. Really I just wanted to go to the northernmost point of the island and say "Yup... north and south, done it." But I found a few surprises on the way.

Definitely not a tourist area

I started my trip by going up to Tanshui, the northern most point on the MRT. While there I was looking for a bus that would take me to that point, and happened along a tourist bus going along the north coast. It was $100 and I could hop on and off at any time for the day. That sounded great to me, so off I went. They gave me a pamphlet detailing what I could see at each stop, and honestly 99% looked like crap. But a few things did look interesting.

The one I was actually going for, the extremely not well documented northernmost point in Taiwan. They didn't stop there, so I got off at the nearest stop - about half a mile away. Armed with Google Maps I started walking through areas I doubt many tourists have been to, passing through a light industry, harbor like area. There were many glances at the strange foreigner who is clearly lost. I continued on through a village, before finding a field. At the other end of this field I could see a path. Unfortunately this field was also used for horses, or cows, or something because it was muddy and covered in manure. But shoes be damned, I went through, and it turned into an immaculately maintained path to a lighthouse. It was locked unfortunately. It's quite pretty there, they should turn it into a proper destination.

Hi!

The other POI was Yeliou Geopark. What is a geopark? Apparently it's a place where you look at rocks. It was $50 to get in, but standing on the wharf I could see the entire park pretty clearly. It was a trail along the beach to a base of a mountain, that you couldn't actually climb. I thought this was dumb. Their rocks were not that pretty. So I didn't go. But they did have a tourist tra... err, shopping mall which had a small aquarium underneath. Walking around I passed by a stairwell and heard music, which sounded very familiar. I checked my phone to see if it started playing on its own, but it was not. I went up the stairway, and as the music got clearer, I was right - it was the battle theme to Final Fantasy XIII. Really. And I just downloaded that song last night. I turn the corner, and I see a dolphin show synchronized to that music, perhaps the oddest choice ever for a dolphin show. Try to imagine the picture on the right set to this:

This move costs 10 MP

So, that's weird. Not really dolphin music. But hey, leave it playing. Maybe it will make reading this blog epic.

The last stop was to Jilong, home of the famous night market. I like Jilong's night market. I didn't have too much time to check it out, but it's actually not really a night market - it's 24 hours. An odd point of trivia is that in all Taiwanese night markets you will find a temple - which is why the night market exists, I guess because it's a natural meeting place. The Jilong one is pretty awesome. It's smaller than Shilin of course, but densely packed with food, food, and more food. Best place to eat in Taiwan, for sure.

Hopping on the train back to Taipei, I met Tiffany for dinner at the #1 rated beef noodle shop in the country. At least, the one that took 1st place in last years beef noodle festival. It was very good, but sorry, Taiwan. You can't compete with China's noodles - they just do it better over there.