Taipei Zoo and Maokong Cable Car

We've since made it back to Hong Kong and wrapped up our Chinese new year break, but I'm still playing catch up on my posts and will revisit the third and fourth days of our trip in Taiwan, when we went to the Taipei Zoo and Maokong Gondola and then headed to Taichung.  These blog posts have been a beast to update!

It was an unseasonably cold winter in Taiwan this year, and it rained on the day we were up on Maokong.  But we were blessed with fairly good weather beforehand. 

We started the morning by taking the MRT to the Taipei Zoo.

It was super cool because the kids haven't seen big or exotic animals like elephants, koalas or hippos in the flesh before. 

The Zoo had really cool little trolley buses painted like various animals that took you up the hill to the upper parts of the zoo - it reminded me of one of the kids' favorite Curious George books. The train zips uphill and allows you to work your way down the mountain instead of up, and is definitely the way to go!

We saw some eye boggling old and big and slow tortoises.  It made me wistful for the Galapagos. Is the world's oldest living tortoise still alive?

This penguin was so cute and cracked the kids up by performing all kinds of graceful acrobatic dives and dips in front of them.  What a little showboat.

After that we saw a decidedly less friendly mountain lion, whose fierce screeching we heard from afar:

and then some elephants and hippos!

I had forgotten how unattractive and large hippos are...!

After this it was late and the kids were tired so we stopped trying to track down the lion or the rhino, and instead headed to the Taipei Zoo stop on the Maokong cable car, the second of four stops to reach the summit of nearby Maokong mountain.  Look at that beatific grin on Al's face!

And then it was one of the best highlights of the trip!  The cable car!  

Here is possibly my favorite picture from the cable car:

This one is pretty great also:

We were such a big and rowdy group we were guaranteed our own car each time.  The views were magnificent despite the clouds and overcast sky, and the kids loved it. On the way up!

On the way down!

We didn't actually get to enjoy Maokong itself too much, as it had started to rain not long after we got up there. However we got to sample delicious stinky tofu and pickled cabbage, tender pig's blood and white radish soup, and smoky sizzling Taiwanese black pork sausages. Yum.

My heart quickens at bare bones street style cooking like this. 

Then we went to a tea shop that had ice cream... where we bumped into the kids' former mandarin teacher Sophie! It was one of the best coincidences of my life, what are the chances that we would bump into each other amidst the throngs of people in that tea shop on that day at that time on that mountain in Taipei??  Granted, we both live in Hong Kong and were visiting Taiwan, but she is from the South and it was our last day in Taipei (we were heading to see if family in Taichung for the remainder of the trip).  She had actually messaged me that morning, prior to actually seeing me, musing that it would be funny if we bumped into each other because she and her husband planned to be in Taipei.  I said her ears must have been ringing since we were just thinking and talking about her that morning also!

The most unexpected reunion!!  Amazing.  

But between our squealing and screaming over this miracle, and the kids shouting and screaming and freaking out over ice cream (note the boys' singular focus in the pic; this was immediately post-fight), we made an absolute ruckus and were kicked out of the shop.