Thursday, November 12
Queen’s Head at Yehliu Geopark
Today we headed out of the city to the coastal area about 45 minutes northeast of Taipei.
We were joined today by a Canadian man, Michael Hurst, who has lived in Taiwan since the mid-80’s and has made it his life's work to memorialize the Prisoners of War from both world wars who were held on Taiwan. Our first stop was a visit to an old copper mine that has been converted into a museum. While this had been a working mine before WWII, the POWs were used as slave labor during the war to continue the mining of the ore.
From there we went to visit the POW Memorial Park, which is situated on the site of one of the camps. While none of the buildings remain, we were invited to imagine what the grounds would have looked like during the war. Now the park serves as a peaceful and proper memorial to honor those who were imprisoned, as well as a place for their descendants to remember them.
The wall containing 4,363 allied prisoners’ names.
I commend their website to you.
Next was lunch. Since we are a large group (16 plus our 2 leaders), we were seated at two large round tables with a lazy susan built in to the middle of the table. And the food keeps arriving… They also serve tea, warm water to drink, and we ordered some beer. There was seafood, and shellfish in many forms, chicken, and pork, cabbage, vegetables of all kinds. I didn’t take any pictures of the food, but here’s the “after” of the table:
After lunch we drove north and west, to the Yehliu Geopark to see the sea-eroded hoodoos and mushroom rocks. The “land” here is made up of sandstone and limestone textured sandstone which erodes easily leaving these funky “sculptures.”
Tomorrow we leave Taipei and head south to a city halfway down the west side if the island.