Taipei, Taiwan: Guandu Nature Reserve
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Guandu MRT Station
One very effective way to get attention is to distribute brochures. On this trip, it was a bimonthly pamphlet I found in my hotel room called “Spectacular Taipei”. It was filled with sections dealing with flowers, and floral expositions (Spring is about to arrive) and one thing caught my eye, and it was a map of a Nature Reserve just outside of Taipei and a few stations before Danshui, what I call “Deauville of Taiwan”, and which I have been to many times. Best of all, it was reachable by the excellent Taipei MRT. On the map, Guandu looked like a small town, with a temple being the centre of attention, and a wetland park on its borders. Guandu straddles the Danshui and Keelung river.
Now I’ll confess I’m bored with Taipei city centre, so anything nature is interesting to me at this stage.
Guandu town backstreets. I'm looking for my way to the wetland park.
Looks like a wetland to me, I should be quite close...
Getting there is straight forward. Get yourself onto the Danshui Metro line, and while my brain is still fresh from the trip, that’s the blue line that goes up north. Somewhere along the way, some of the trains will terminate at Beitou and you will have to get off and switch to one that goes all the way to Danshui. Should be rather obvious when you’re in the metro. The tip here is that the MRTs to Beitou is almost always empty, as the whole of Taipei goes to Danshui on the weekend.
Guandu Nature Park:
When you get to Guandu station, there are buses going to the Nature Park or the temple, but it’s not fun if you don’t push it a little, so I walk instead. It takes a good half an hour to get to the Nature Park entrance. But that’s mostly because I set off on a different direction and went through some nice tour of almost the whole of Guandu town.
