7th day: Hiking in Dakeng scenic area

Today I went with my hostfamily to Dakeng scenia area to hike which is close to Taichung city. However before hiking I was a bit frightened if it will not be too hot and difficult to hike as I come from the country where the highest “mountain” is just 300 meters high. But despite my previous worries at the end everything went perfectly. We found a beginning of one of the trails of Dakeng scenic area and my host family said that it was also their first time hiking in this area. We left our car in a car parking place and we started our journey up to the mountain. While we were hiking, on the sides of the trail was a few kiosks and sales assistants who offered us the drinks, food, hiking equipment and even a traditional and herbal medicine but we had our own drinks and equipment. I recognized that a lot of kiosks were empty and I guess mostly hikers probably hike in this area on the weekends. However when we climbed up I recognized a few old ladies who were climbing down so we weren’t completely alone. Actually I enjoyed that there wasn’t a lot of people so that I could enjoy a beautiful nature landscape. While we were climbing up I took so many pictures because there was a lot of plants, fruits and flowers which I saw the first in my life and in addition they were so beautiful and colorful. I think that Taiwan will never stop to impress me and I hope that I have a chance to come back to travel again in this country. After approximately 2 hours with several stopovers we reached a top and after a short rest we climbed down which was the easiest task of the whole hiking trip. We climbed down to the same place where we started to hike and after that we went to the closest café to have a lunch. My host family ordered a food and repeatedly I tasted one more new food . Then we were heading back to Changhua as we spent almost half of a day in hiking but it was fine with me as I was kind of tired after hiking.