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Mountain Climbing and Hiking In Daken

Central Taiwan is a very mountainous area and there are several awesome trails to take if you are an avid mountaineer or backpacker. Most of the trails are actually not that bad. The longest one that we saw was about 10 kilometers. You do need to be careful when choosing a trail to follow because many of them are very vertical and not just lazy walking forward as you'll see in some of the pictures below. We were guided to Daken by a nice Taiwanese girl that we met our first week here. From Taichung it took us about 30 minutes to drive to the beginning of the trails.

We got up pretty early to go to Daken as it was a bit of a drive away from Taichung. A few of us picked up some breakfast and others ate at the little Chow Mein station that was at the beginning of the trail. The start of the trail is very level and just lazy walking. It's when you see the sign warning you of the wild monkeys in the surrounding tropics that the trail starts to get difficult. I'm not sure if there's any coincidence hidden in there, I only saw 1 monkey while hiking this trail.

We reached quite a few peaks before finally getting to the top of the mountain. The information display we read before starting the trail said it was a 1.8 kilometer hike which is a little over a mile. I can tell you first hand, either we read it wrong or it lied because there is no way it was that short. I'd have to say it was at least 3-4 miles long. It took us 2-3 hours to get to the top, but it was a lot of vertical climbing so maybe that is what got us.

The trip back down went surprisingly fast, primarily because the leaders of the pack were getting really hungry. The ones who ate no breakfast were paying for it, no one had expected that the trial would be as strenuous as it was. Personally I loved it, I was leading everyone on the way up periodically waiting for the rest of the girls to catch up. We met a lot of Taiwanese who were also traveling the trail, apparently for many of them it was what they did on the weekends.

After a fun hike we were all starved. A few of us settled for the Chow Mein vendor at the entrance of the trail, while the rest of us could wait for some real food a bit later on. So, on our way back to Taichung we stopped off at a restaurant to get some food. BRACE YOURSELF, if you've never seen what food looks like from a normal Taiwanese restaurant the picture of the dish i got below will probably look like something out of your nightmares. However, I assure you it was very good--soup with lamb, rice, noodles and some veggies. Westerners are used to a certain type of food looking a certain type of way, Taiwanese people are exactly the same and this is how their food looks.