Travel in Taiwan. My name is Johan and

I'm going to show you some pictures of

a hot-spring town

called Guanziling today. If you don't know where

Guanziling is, let me show you on Google Map.

Here we have Taiwan. If you don't know where Taiwan is,

it's in Asia,

here you see China, Japan and here

are the Philippines. So we are based in Taipei

in the north of Taiwan, and Guanziling is

all the way down here,

around here.

So it's in

southern Taiwan and it's close

to the city of Chiayi

which is about here.

Can't see the name. But it's part of Tainan City, which is

around here.

Tainan City. How did we get there?

We took...

Let me first show you how far it is.

It's 304 kilometers.

It's about 300 kilometers

from Taipei to Guanziling and

it takes about

more than three hours by car.

This time we didn't take the car, but we took the high-speed rail,

which also follows the western coast.

All the way down here. The nearest

high-speed railway station to Guanziling is Chiayi.

And the station is outside

Chiayi City and the

high-speed railway station is at Taibao, which is about here. So how did we get from

the station to Guanziling,

which is here?

There are a few options. There is no direct bus,

public bus from here to here. So if you want to take the bus, you have to

first take

the shuttle bus to Chiayi City.

Oh, first let me show you the

information about the high-speed rail.

If you take the high-speed rail from Taipei

to Chiayi at 8 o'clock, you will arrive at

Chiayi at 9:24,

so it's one hour and 24 minutes.

And it costs you 1,180 NT dollars.

If you take the conventional train,

you can do that as well, from

Taipei to Chiayi.

You leave at 8 and you'll arrive at 11:30.

So it's 3 hours and 30 minutes.

Two hours more than the high-speed rail, and it will cost you

600, that's half the price.

Like I said, from the

high-speed railway station to Guanziling, there is no bus.

So you have to take the bus first to downtown Chiayi.

Actually to the railway station there. And you can do this

by using the THSR shuttle bus,

which is free. You just have to show your

train ticket, and it takes about half an hour to go to

downtown Chiayi. In Chiayi you can take the bus,

you can take the bus from Chiayi to Guanziling.

And I show you the bus company's website. There is no

English here.

You have different bus routes here. And the one to Guanziling

is this one, it's number 7214.

Chiayi to Guanziling. Let me open it

and show you. Buses leave on top of the hour

or each hour, 7, 8, 9 and so on, and here you can see quite a lot of stops.

I don't know exactly how long it takes, probably

about an hour or maybe 40 or maybe 50 minutes.

And it will cost you,

if you look here, the price list, this is Chiayi,

and this is Guanziling. So it's

93 Taiwan dollars, which is about

3 bucks US.

If you don't want to

take the bus and if you want

to make it quicker, you can do what we did, we went,

we took the high-speed rail to

the high-speed railway station and just took a taxi from there to Guanziling.

There are taxis

waiting outside and you have to negotiate the price.

I think they will ask for 800 NT-Dollar

and I think we agreed on 700

or something like that.

The taxi will go from here to Guanziling across...

They will take some minor roads here

and they will pass the town of Baihe. Baihe is here.

This is an interesting place.

They have a lot of lotus flower fields,

which is quite nice in the summer. Let me show you

how it looks. Those are

beautiful lotus flowers.

They have

a lot of lotus flower fields, and actually you can sit on those

leaves, if you are not too heavy.

And they do have a flower festival,

a lotus flower festival during the summer.

Let's go back to the map.

The map is here. So, you pass Baihe,

and then you come to the Guanziling area.

This is plains.

The flatlands, the area of Guanziling is

quite hilly, those are the foot hills

of the central mountains.

And Guanziling is here and

it's in a small valley.

Let me show you some pictures.

It's not really a very attractive

for my taste, a very attractive village

in terms of architecture and buildings.

They have a little stream here, they tried to make it prettier by

building this kind of walkways,

and you have a bridge over the highway here,

where you can go from the lower section of Guanziling to the

higher section, upper section, where you have

more hotels and...

this is the older part of town

where you can see some of the

older hot-spring hotels, which have been around

for quite a long time. You can see the different spellings

of Kuan Tzu Ling, Guanziling.

This a very old house, probably built during the Japanese...

the early 20th century, by the Japanese.

And have a look here.

They have a bridge over the river.

We did look around a bit, but then

it was time to have lunch, and for lunch we went to a restaurant called

Top Rock.

Let me show you the map where it is.

This is the Guanziling area.

And the restaurant where we had lunch

is about here, this one. So from

here, the main area,

if you walk, it's like 10-15 minutes.

And if you want to have a look,

how it looks on Street View.

Have a look.

It's somewhere, you come

up here, this highway, the 175.

There is a bend in the road and

the restaurant is hidden behind those trees.

Let me show you some pictures. It's the Rock

Top, Top Rock or Rock Top? Rock Top restaurant.

You can see the entrance

and here it says,

they have chicken. G means chicken.

And afternoon tea and you go in there,

very lovely place. "We are in business"

"Ying ya zhong"

Then we met this guy.

This is the owner, it's not a gangster, he looks a bit, but he's very friendly.

And he introduced us to the dishes on the menu.

We first had some refreshing juice, and then

we had this one, a vegetable

dish, and

then we had some sausages. Very nice.

And then, this was the best part of the

meal, free-range chicken,

from a farm in the area. Very delicious, tender meat.

Very flavorful, really great, great stuff.

The area around Guanziling is also known as

coffee country. They have coffee plantations

there, and they actually use the coffee beans

to make soup. You see, those are coffee beans and it's very

strong flavored chicken soup. And we also had

this very delicious pork. Here you can see all the dishes at once.

And you sit in this kind of simple

dining room, the windows

are open and you can see outside,

it's green and very nice.

And they also have a coffee shop place. And the people there are very friendly.

And they have

this old car, from the, I don't know, from the '50s

or maybe from

the '60s.

Then we went on

to do some

sightseeing around Guanziling.

Let's go back to the map.

It's slow, the computer.

Here is the restaurant, and we went further down,

the 175.

It becomes 172, not 72.

And there is a place called the Guanziling

"Shui Huo Tong Yuan", and that translated

it means Water Fire Spring.

Let's see it on

Google Street View. Let's see what it looks like.

Should be here.

You see, here's the highway. And it is just

down here somewhere.

You go down here. There are stairs. Let me show you how it looks.

Let me show you some photos.

"Shui Huo Tong Yuan". There is no English here.

It means Water and Fire Spring.

You go down there, and that's basically it. It's a very small place.

There you can see the fire coming out of the wall.

Some gas coming out there, and someone must have ignited it.

And they have water there.

So, fire coming out of the water. And you see

there is some very old

plate there, and

the fire is burning all the time, even during heavy rain.

Even during typhoons. And this is the owner of the restaurant

where we had lunch and this young lady drove us around.

She is from the Siraya National Scenic Area,

which Guanziling

is part of. So we had

a car and were driven around.

That was very nice.

Some more photos. There are some eateries

down there, you can see, you can have noodles, rice,

rice noodles, bamboo tube rice,

and stinky tofu, very important. Then we went

to another place. This one to

have coffee. Let's go back to the map.

So, no no no no...

From the Fire and

Water spring we went further down

here the road to the Guanziling

Biyun Temple. There is a temple there, a very nice one.

If you have time to look around

and if you have means of transport, because there is no

public transport, it's very good idea

to take this road here

to go to the Biyun Temple. And the temple looks

like... Let me show you.

Biyun Temple is here. It's actually a very pretty temple.

It looks like this.

Very old. It looks a bit like it could be in

Mainland China, for me at least. It's called Biyun Temple, the

"Temple of the Azure Clouds".

You can see nice temple art.

Dragons up there and I don't know who this is.

Maybe can check it out online.

Phoenix and dragons.

And those are very cute lions in front of

the entrance. There is one on the left and one on the right side.

We made photos here.

And I like this temple quite a lot.

Then we went on.

We took the car back here, went here,

and then went down the 175. And the 175 is known as

"Coffee Road" because there are a lot of

coffee plantations on the side of the road.

Let me show you some pictures online.

The area is called Dongshan,

and it's the Dongshan Coffee Road.

And you have

quite a few... looks like this.

Very hilly place

and the roads are very nice, if you