Vacation Sun Moon Lake (23-24 June 2008)

Immediately after leaving Kaohsiung, we headed for Sun Moon Lake. From Kaohsiung, we took the High Speed Rail (HSR) to Taichung, the journey being slightly less than an hour. From Taichung, a car ride of 1 hour 15 minutes brought us to Sun Moon Lake.

Sun Moon Lake is the largest lake in Taiwan and located in the centre of Taiwan. It is called "Sun Moon Lake" because the eastern part of the lake is shaped round like the sun, while the western part is shaped like a crescent moon. In the middle of Sun Moon Lake is an island called Lalu Island, which separates the "sun" and the "moon" part of the Lake. Lalu Island, which used to home to the Shao tribe (one of the aboriginal tribes in Taiwan), used to be much bigger than what it is now. Unfortunately, during the building of a hydroelectric power plant in 1934, water was channeled into Sun Moon Lake from neighbouring lakes to increase the depth of the Lake from 6 to 27 metres. This made the island smaller than what it was. In addition, an earthquake in 1999 sunk the island further. Lalu island is now off-limits to the public, but regular boat trips every hour bring visitors close to the island for a better view.

Below is a picture taken at the aboriginal village at Sun Moon Lake. There were some curios, interesting teas and food items, but we didn't end up getting anything.

Here at Sun Moon Lake, we stayed at the Del Lago hotel, a relatively new hotel which opened in 2005. The rooms were beautiful and modern, but probably more suited to honeymooners or couples looking for a getaway. As you can see from the pictures below, the bathtub is of "open-concept", so one can admire the lovely view of Sun Moon Lake while taking a bath.

The rooms that we got overlooked Sun Moon Lake and the views were simply stunning.

There were separate shower and toilet cubicles with doors, but even then, the doors didn't have locks on them. Thankfully, we were given two rooms side-by-side to each other, so we could send DS off to the next room if we wanted to use the toilet or have a shower.

I couldn't resist taking a picture of the shower cubicle with the very modern shower system in it. At the touch of a knob, one could direct water to come out from either of the two shower heads, or from the holes located on the shower system panel (which sent water shooting out horizontally!). Very cool. Of course, DH had a ball of a time playing with the shower system.