Here’s a glimpse of Sun Moon Lake through the trees, as I was pretending to take a picture while I was fighting for breath on a crazy uphill climb. Why, oh why do I climb things when I’m on holidays?
We were driving back to Taipei, and this was a beautiful place to stop for a few hours to break the journey.

Sun Moon Lake is the largest lake in Taiwan. It’s in the mountains in central Taiwan, and is a huge holiday destination here.

It’s not connected to any other body of water and is 748 metres above sea level.

The Japanese made Sun Moon Lake into a dam and increased the depth of the lake by 3 times.

The walk to the pagoda goes up 570 metres. I was NOT a happy camper on the way up. It was a long walk.

Yes, I was grumpy. Look at the size of this thing! Not only had I walked up 500 metres, I still had to go higher.

”Frogdancer!” called Blogless Sandy from the top. “Come up!”

”No,” I said, but we all knew that I’d got my breath back. I was always going to climb up.

But ok… the view wasn’t bad.

I was still tired, though. But look at the mountains behind me.

Those 3 tiny figures on the ground are Cindy and a couple from the group. That’s how tall this pagoda is.

The lake went around three sides of the pagoda, and the mountains encircled us entirely.

The entire interior of this island is covered with mountains.

And what mountains! They’re how mountains should be; all straight up and down with fabulous shapes at the top.

We went down to the town for lunch, then we wandered around for an hour or so.

We sat for a while on the harbour, chatting with some of the group.

Some kid probably went to drama school for 4 years to end up doing this.

Boat time! We had a little cruise on the lake before we went back on the bus.

I tell you, my feet were looking forward to relaxing.

But not so fast…

We stopped off to walk UP to another temple. Bloody hell!

What was strange about this temple was that the monk who founded it had his remains (mainly just his head) split in two. The Japanese took him back to Japan when WWII broke out, and then after the war they gave half of him back to be buried here in this temple.

Half of him.

This was back at the dock when we came back down. It’s probably the monk, in happier times.

Mel took this shot, looking behind us on the bus as we made our way through the traffic back to Taipei. This is the last day of the guided tour. We have a free day tomorrow before we fly home on Friday.

This man takes his pet pig to the night market every night. I tell you what, he’s a big boy!

Dad joke of the day: