Double 10 Weekend Trip To Sun Moon Lake (日月潭) & Toushe Reservoir (頭社水庫)

Me on the 21 up to Sun Moon Lake from Shueili at about 6.30am.

I arrived in Nantou before dawn Saturday morning with the aim of having a little look at Sun Moon Lake and making a visit to neighbouring Toushe reservoir, which is something of a dwarf compared to the lake. I am conscious of the fact that there is an awful lot for me to see and learn about at Sun Moon Lake and that there are limits to what I can accomplish on a day trip; I don't know how many trips I will have to make here, but there will have to be several more at least. On the way uphill to the lake on highway 21, I noticed these drainage pipes sticking out of the retaining walls...

So I thought I might as well stop to photograph them so as to compare with those I had seen earlier at Wu Jie adjustment pool. Here's a close-up...

Although dawn had come and there was a bit of sunshine, it was very cloudy and the air was still hazy when I arrived at the inconspicuous turn-off for Toushe reservoir to the south-west of the lake...

The sign for Toushe Reservoir is so small that it is easy to miss, even if you are looking for it.

The public signs have been rendered into fairly good English, but as usual there is an awful lot of romantic "padding" and precious little actual information...

Rather than enter the boardwalk approach to Toushe reservoir immediately, I hopped back on the bike and drove up to the lake as I needed to go to the bathroom and get something to drink. I stopped briefly on the way back down to Toushe to photograph the other photographers. I didn't know what they were trying to do, since the air was still dank and misty and there was barely any sunshine at all; it was an awful morning for taking pictures...

I quickly got back down to Toushe and the boardwalk entry to the reservoir...

It's a brief stroll before you see the first check dam on the stream...

A central channel passes out from the dam to the lower reach of the stream; there is no control-gate...

Around the corner, there was another information panel proclaiming the "fine stream ecology" and then predictably saying nothing substantive about the actual ecology. Instead there were a few airy remarks about aesthetics...

Around the corner I got my first view of the reservoir as the stream widened out to enter it...

The view looking back toward the little suspension bridge from atop a spillway exit...

The spillway exit is formed from three grilled boxes beneath a bridge...

It leads into a small, overgrown gully which, for some reason, has a wooden staircase leading down into it but has been cordoned off to the public. Perhaps there had formerly been a trail leading through it that has since been neglected...

Looking out onto the reservoir itself; it is very small with an area of about five hectares and a storage capacity of less than 300,000 cubic meters...

There was a promising-looking hollow concrete box on top of the reservoir which I climbed thinking there might be further information signs as it was an obvious place for people to stand around looking and taking photographs. However, there was nothing there but a wrought-iron fence so I'm at a loss as to what its' purpose is. Behind me to the left of the image below, there is a small pavilion which could also serve the functions I had supposed for the hollow concrete box...

A look back toward the suspension bridge...

Just up from the concrete box and before the pavilion, at last, I found a real information panel though it was in Chinese...

There was also a large marble tablet about the reservoir...

... and an accompanying marble stele...

From further around the circumference path, another look out over the reservoir with the pavilion off to the right hand side...

Several little holiday chalets sat alongside the reservoir's bank with a somewhat larger holiday complex of sorts behind it up on the embankment levee surrounded by betelnut trees...

A couple of shots looking back out toward the pavilion and concrete box from the other side of the reservoir; by now the sun was starting to get a bit stronger and one or two clouds were dispersing...

I much prefer the 10mm to the 18mm for shots like this where there is substantial sky reflection in the water...

At the far-end of the reservoir standing upon the crest of the dam; in the background is the major spillway arrangement and in the foreground is the water tower to take water out of the reservoir for irrigation...

The spillway design is somewhat unusual in that it lies diametrically opposite the dam, but it suits the site. It is an open overflow ogee-crest weir leading into a curved channel oriented at a slight angle and surmounted with a concrete flood wall...

I left Toushe reservoir at sometime around 10am and headed off to Sun Moon Lake again, this time pausing at the impressive and architecturally striking visitor center...

It's an interesting and visually impressive building, and the architects must have made an absolute fortune off it, but the visitor's center itself and the available information is very poor. Basically, there is a lot of advertising for local "industries" (e.g. rice-wine and tea), and a few leaflets about what to see and do in and around Sun Moon Lake and elsewhere in Taiwan (and Taipei) - it is all obviously aimed at tourists from China. There is nothing substantive about the history of the lake or the Japanese-built hydroelectric schemes at all.

Whilst I was there however, a woman who worked at the visitor's center approached me to ask if I needed help, I didn't but she gave it anyway; she sounded like she was regurgitating an English language script. She would say things like "...it costs only three hundred and sixty dollars" and you could sense that she had remembered on purpose to include the word "only". She had been talking about the cost of taking a tour boat as an alternative to driving the 21_A up to the hilltop pagoda to take pictures. She had said that the road leading up to the pagoda was too far and difficult to drive on a motorcycle. To be fair to her, she had no idea of the kind of driving I usually do or that my combined train fares to get here from Tainan city had cost less than the boat tour she was trying to sell me. She was only trying to be helpful, but I found her presumption that the 21_A was too difficult to be ridiculous. Still the building itself is worth it...

This is what it is all about really...

Hotels in the distance, on the other side of the lake...

People milling about taking pictures to show their friends and families where they have been. It is a perfect place for this with the water-terraces reflecting the skies and prefacing the view over the lake...

I left the visitor's center somewhat disappointed, and immediately headed for the 21_A up around the surrounding mountains on the east side of the lake. It had one or two switchbacks, but it was an easy and pleasant ride. It didn't take me long to find the turn-off for the pagoda and associated temple, but when I got up there it was wreathed in mist and I couldn't see a thing which rendered the whole object - taking pictures of the lake - pointless. I came back down again and drove further along the 21 hoping to get a few mist-free glimpses of the lake. However, it was by now mid-morning and though the sun got stronger and the mist clung only to the east-side mountains, the air over the lake was still hazy...

Looking up at the cable cars passing through the mist which clung to the mountains all morning...

I drove the entire circle of the 21_A and 21 around Sun Moon Lake, stopping only to buy some souvenirs for work-colleagues (I decided to save money and just buy cookies instead) before I headed back downhill into Shueili township. At the gas station the girl who served me had been the same girl (I think) who had served me there two weeks previously. I wasn't sure that she remembered me but she seemed keen to talk to me for some reason - the usual questions: what country I am from, what do I do, whether I am married and so on. Yet when I reached for my wallet to pay her - nightmare! - it wasn't there. I checked all my pockets and bags in vain. The last place I had handled it had been the souvenir shop up at the lake, so I took out their cookies, got the phone number off the back and called them. The number wasn't to the shop-floor but to a manager's office elsewhere, which I hadn't known, and so when I introduced myself as the foreigner who had bought some cookies half an hour ago, she immediately presumed that I was calling about cookies, but once I got her to shut up about cookies and explained that I thought I might have left my wallet there by mistake she got onto the shop floor girl and called me back two minutes later to say that the shop floor girl had found it and was holding it for me. So that was forty minutes wasted - driving back up the mountain to the lake to get my wallet and back down into Shueili again. By this time the combined weight of all my bags, plus the helmet was giving me muscle strain and I was tired. I left Shueili for Checheng stopping only to photograph the Chukung hydroelectric power plant from across the river...

Coming back into Checheng, I took a few at-distance long-lens shots of the Mingtan reservoir dam using the 300mm...

But once I had parked the bike I was too tired to climb up to the dam for more photographs, and so I settled on waiting around an hour or so before the 2.20pm train (there was an earlier train at 1pm which I could have taken had I been a bit quicker, but it was pointless as there was no connecting train from Ershui in Changhua until 3.12pm - and the 2.20pm train would get me there for that connection). So I sat around drinking a beer and then a tea just so I could flirt with the tea girl who had been eyeballing me. She liked it. When the train came there was the usual chaos of about 500 passengers trying to alight onto a tiny little platform itself holding another 500 people waiting to board the train. Then there was the usual crush of everyone pushing and shoving to get on the train as quickly as possible to get a seat. I hate that. I just stood back and waited because I refuse to push my way through a crowd of old people and families with small children. That stereotypically British attitude nearly cost me my trip however, as I was the last person to board despite having been one of the first people on the platform with a ticket. I almost didn't make it.

For the next trip, I might look into leaving Checheng station and parking further down the Jiji line.