Jialuohu 2, Yilan County – 加羅湖

I recently took another trip to the remote mountain lake, Jialuohu 加羅湖 with Neil again.  This was our second trip here and both times have been fantastic.  Won’t write too much about the actual hike.  Anyone looking for details can find them on my original post – Jialuohu

Here’s a few photos from the trip. 

More photos from Neil here.

Jialuohu early morning

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Songluo Lake – 松羅湖

Songluohu 松羅湖 is a kind of swampy lake set in a small basin and surrounded by mountains on all sides. It’s a tremendously beautiful place and in some ways very similar to Jialuohu 加羅湖 which is also in Yilan. They are both great places to hike and camp and both can easily be done in a weekend.

We set off on Saturday morning and took the number 9 towards Yilan. It’s a great road to drive on, especially since most of the Taipei to Yilan traffic now goes through the Xueshan tunnel. And the views of the Yilan plain towards the end of the road are spectacular (weather permitting!).

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Jialuo Lake – 加羅湖

For this four day weekend we had originally planned to hike some of the bigger mountains of Taiwan but getting a permit proved difficult and so we settled on going to Jia Luo lake in Yilan.

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Xinshan – 新山

This is a nice little ridge hike just a bit north of Xizhi 汐止. I had the afternoon off the other week but unfortunately no one else did. However rather sitting around on me own I decided I would just go out for a drive/hike anyway.

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Jiaming Lake – 嘉明湖

This is a trip that I had been meaning to make for sometime and, like so many of my ideas, I just hadn’t got round to doing it but finally Chinese new year gave me the opportunity to get up off my arse and go.Jiaminghu is a lake in the south of Taiwan, in Taidong county. It was first thought that the lake was created by a meteor strike, but it turns out that it is actually a tarn left over from the ice age and was created around 6-7000 years ago.  The lake is elliptical in shape and is actually quiet deep (10m) at the deepest point. My original plan included swimming in the lake but temperatures barely getting above zero put that idea to rest!

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