Today, it was clear blue skies. Today, I'm off to the mountains. I'm getting more localised now. Why? I don't really need to tread cautiously to see if we have boarded the train. We are one-day old Taiwanese MRT traveller by now.
On the right of the picture, I can see Park Taipei Hotel peeking out from the rest of the other buildings. So cheeky! The train took us southwards towards Taipei Zoo.
Once you pass the turnstiles of the MRT station, take the escalator down and look for signs that lead you towards the Maokong Gondola. Then turn left make your way to the station. It was a pretty long walk and the sun was out, making it a rather warm day. You'd need to pass by MacDonalds and other buildings seemingly related to the Taipei Zoo.
Well, buying the tickets is the easy part. you'd just need to give the counter person NT100 (This is totally worth the money) and she'll pass you two tickets for a return trip. There're two stations that you can alight at - the Taipei Zoo station and the Zhinan Temple station. I skipped both these stations as I'd really wanted to see only Maokong.
As it was a weekend, it was a moderately long wait of 30 minutes. I'm quite sure that if we'd visited on a weekday, it would have been less crowded. We had other plans for the other days. Also the Gondolas are closed on Mondays. You can still make it up via their bus services, but I really wanted to try the gondola. So Maokong on a weekend it was.
The 25 minutes ride up in the gondola gave our legs some respite after the moderately long wait at the gondola station. The scenes that you get on a clear day are just gorgeous. Other than a chatty set of grandparents and their grandchildren, the ride up was a thrill. You'll get to see the landscape of Taipei, tea plantations, temples being built at the edge of cliffs, and Taipei 101 in the distant.
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