Did I say that this country is amazingly beautiful? I guess I'm going to repeat this phrase in each post dedicated to Taiwan!

Yangmingshan National park is a true emerald kingdom of Taipei. It has a lot of hiking trails to offer. People go there to relax from the city's routine. It's an ideal place to get a physical exercise and at the same time to get relaxation and energy watching the nature.

The very first thing we encountered when we came to the park: the maps that were distributed to the tourists were all in characters, so apart from a green picture we had no clue which stations on a map were the ones we wanted. Even the touristic centers weren't that much helpful, since people didn't understand us enough in order to give proper instructions

So, we bought a round ticket that was a hop on- hop off option for some 60 TWD and decided to hit the road. 

Our first destinantion was Erziping trail. The trail itself was very easy to master, since there were no slope hills. It was like going into one of those Asian movies where they show you a big dramatical story with the superpicturesque nature on the background.

Our next destination happened to be Qi Xing Shan 七星山. Firstly, when we looked at a map, we were wondering, why 1.8 kms would take approximately an hour to go. We understood it a few minutes later when we saw that there was no end to the "vertical" stairs that were leading in the direction of the sky.

We were passing rice fields and then old volcano that smelled like rotten eggs.

We reached at first the highest peak, which was a Qixing peak, then an Eastern Peak, which was another 0.8 km of hiking, since it was supposed to lead us to one magic pond that was a very tempting spot to visit. The only thing I can clearly remember is that it was the toughest hiking I've ever made.

And here it was, our main aim, main desired destination. The pond, that was calling us from fancy pictures from google. 

Somehow when they were advertising Yangmigshan national park, they forgot to mention that this marvelous pond has already been dry for 20 years :)