Wulai River Swimming & Jungle Obstacle Course

Eliza, Leia, and I went to Wulai last weekend! A beautiful little town nestled in the jungle covered hills about 20-30 minutes away form Taipei by vehicle. Wulai is known for their riverside hot springs but they also have some other amazing jungle amusement park secret areas!

Wulai has a very popular "old street" with lots of food, fruits, veggies, trinkets, and millet wine.  We were expecting crowds of people on a Saturday morning but thankfully it was fairly quiet.

So much fresh fruit!  These ones are pre-covered with some type of sweet salty crystals.  Being a tourist spot these fruits are more expensive than they normally would be from the grocery store

a small pottery shop that had tons of stuff for my mom!

sugar puller at work!  out of all the places I wanted to get a sample of this stuff but they didn't offer any :|

The main river passing through Wulai.  You can see the professional floater down on the left.  No  equipment necessary for him to float peacefully down the river!  It was hot out! (mid 30's) and we were jealous.

The little tourist log train was out of service from a recent landslide so we walked up along the road following the river.

After 10 minutes we were sweat buckets!

Traditional Taiwanese dancing show!

Even 83 year old grandma jumped in!  She was really cute

We awaited for the gondola to take us up to the other hill top.  The ride cost $150NT each ($5CAD)

The gondola rises up over a large set of waterfalls

From the top you can look down to the little town of Wulai.

One of the first "attractions" is a completely free set of photo booths where you can take as many pictures as you want for free!

Next stop was a random amusement park ride.  It was like Mr.Toad's Wild Ride at Disneyland but taken a turn for the worst.  I tried to get pictures inside but it's haunted inside and super dark.  It felt really hand-made inside with the props of zombies and totally random weird stuff but it was surprisingly scary and a lot of fun!  The weirdest part is that this ride was just by itself in the jungle.  No other rides around like it.

We continued up the path towards the main park area

Group photo!

A little lake at the top of the park.  You can rent boats and paddle around if you want.  It was way too hot and I find paddle boats can be a lot of work to move almost nowhere!  So we passed

First thing we did was sit down by the stream and dip our feet.  It felt so refreshing and cool!  The tree's created shade over the whole area.  We started to feel normal again.

Plenty of beautiful butterfly's as usual when you head out of the city

We were starving so we braved a Chinese buffet.  The waitress didn't speak any English so we used our broken chinese.  It took a surprisingly long time to order because every time we picked something and then asked if it was good, the lady would say it wasn't, and recommend something else that we thought didn't sound good. lol.  In the end we got mountain greens, beef in a nice sauce, and bamboo salad.  We forgot to ask for "no mayo" on the bamboo so we had to scrape it off.

One of the highlights for us was this surprise obstacle course built into the jungle!  There is absolutely no supervision and over 25 stations!

Look how cool this looks!  This bottom area was only a little bit easy, but this jungle obstacle course spans up the mountain and into the jungle where there was no one but us.

lol Leia

Squishy but dead cicada

I think we spent the next... hour going up and down over rope bridges, log ladders, and rope pulley systems

This was by far the most unique one we'd seen.

You put your feet in those metal stirrups and then use them in combination with your arms to slide across the pipes.  It's surprisingly difficult but a great core exercise!

My feet were too big to fit in with sandals so I had to go bare foot

Trolley Race!  Eliza won but the "end" wasn't so smooth for her as the trolley ran her right into the wall.  Lucky she had fast reflexes and put her feet up against the wall.  No broken teeth!

Peeked underneath some large leaves and spotted these guys!  Not sure what they are.  They were about an inch and a half long from head to butt

We couldn't really figure this one out.  We think that this is a "multi-player" one where you stand on the platform, and your friends go to the other side and "pull" you up.

The paths in the jungle got a bit confusing so we headed off down this fern path into the jungle.  It was a nice break from the obstacle course and it wound back towards the central park area.

Haven't seen engrish this good in a while!  Oh, and it was also great because it was whack a mole, but with little pugs!

Unlimited free ball tossing into those holes at the top!  And completely out of context model on the left.  Her purse lit up if you sunk one of the balls in one of the money holes on the wall.

We spent some time feeding the koi.  It was fun to target smaller baby fish and try to throw the food to them on the outskirts of the feeding frenzy.  Those fish are aggressive!

"It's a wizard!" I've never seen a little shrine with one of these guys in it before!

The jungle had a lot of large spiders in webs (never see them on the ground).  But this one looked different!   This was about 3.5 inches in diameter with legs fully spread out

You have to go through this museum to get back to the gondola back down.  We were trying to figure out if this thing was once a real animal.  I think it is!  It looked like a rat dear about the size of Eliza's Dad's dog Jiji (1.5 feet long)

Flying squirrel about to pounce on the anime figures!

Took the gondola back down

We started walking further up the road towards Neidong Water fall area, supposedly the most beautiful area, but  it was getting late and we were pretty tired from walking so we decided to head back into town and hit up Neidong next time.

A store that sold old used stuff.  I've never seen used soap for sale...

Leaf bug on the run!

It had been our goal ever since seeing the guy floating down the river at the beginning to go swimming.  We found a secluded area and made our way down and went in for a dip!  Felt incredibly refreshing!

The water was cool but not cold.  For nearly the whole time we were by ourselves.  It was fairly shallow but we found a section where it went up to 8 feet deep.

As I said before, Wulia is known for their hot springs.  As I was walking back I stepped in some soft sand and the sand was warm!  I sat down and scooted back and forth to dig into the sand and it was really nice and hot!  It was like I was sitting in a hot tub in the middle of the river.  Loved it!

I wanted to check out the communal free hot and cold springs by the river but it was getting late and we were exhausted from being out all day so we headed back to the buses.

On our way back we had a millet wine taste testing session with one of the locals.  As you can see there's a large variety.  Some are very sweet, others are smooth, and others are meant to be mixed half half with beer.

The sun had started to set and all the lights had turned on.  There were a lot more people here than there had been earlier in the day, but it still wasn't that busy.

Whole roast pig!  This one was expensive, $300NT ($10CAD) per little box of meat.  I'm sure it's delicious though.

We'd had an amazing day in Wulai and we were definitely be back there to further explore as I know the little town has a lot more to offer that we weren't able to see in 1 day.