Maokong Gondola

Recently Rich and I spent an afternoon visiting Maokong, we choose to arrive in style on the Maokong Gondola. I really love Gondola's and you have an amazing view of Taipei from the Gondola - also when in the gondola you realise Taipei is actually surrounded by beautiful greenery.







Once you reach the summit of the gondola it's hard to believe you are still in Taipei! It's very quiet and very pretty - almost like being at home in New Zealand again but with more tea houses.

Here's a few photo's taken on the way to the tea house we spent our afternoon at - it may be a little hard to see but the photo below actually shows a lizard on a rock. We also saw a lot of beautiful butterflies in really bright colours - unfortunatly they move quickly which makes photo taking pretty difficult but I managed to snap a photo of this little blue and black butterfly.



Here's a few photo's of the tea house we spend the afternoon at - I have to say having tea in Maokong is a pretty expensive experience for Taipei! Our tea and meal cost around NZ$40 - which may not seem like a lot but when you're living in Taiwan and earning Taiwan dollars it's a whole lot of money. It was a fantastic experience - but not something I would do every weekend.


Here's a few photo's from the balcony of the tea house where we drank our tea and ate our lunch. You can see the views are pretty amazing.


Here are the tea making supplies - which left me a little confused! I've visited tea houses in China and Korea but never encountered anything like this. Thankfully one of the staff members could speak a little English and explaned what we needed to do in order to make the tea correctly. It was pretty fun and the tea was amazing.

One of the nice things about visiting this tea house was that you got to take the leftover tea that you didn't drink home with you - I loved the tin our tea came in and I was pretty happy when I found out I could keep it. Here's the tea in a slightly less glorious place - ontop of the fridge in our apartment.