Taiwan Travel: How to go to Cingjing Farm from Taipei?
Before I left to study Mandarin, my ex-colleague told me that she's definitely going to Taiwan to visit me. I asked her where does she want to visit. The first place that she wanted to go is Cingjing Farm (æ¸…å¢ƒè¾²å ´/ QÄ«ng jìng nóngchÇŽng). And my first reaction to her is "Eh?? What? Where is that?".
I totally had not idea where and what to see in Cingjing Farm. So we google it and guess what, there's a website to promote the farm tourism (in English too!) -> http://www.cingjing.gov.tw/en/about/
Cingjing Farm is also widely known as the Alps of Taiwan. Really? Suddenly I feel so outdated. Hahaha.
First question popped to mind though -> How to go to Cingjing Farm?
There are a number of ways to go to Cingjing Farm. But since we didn't want to fork out money for HSR, we decided to go by bus from Taipei. The bus is called E-go Bus and the bus trip will be started from Taipei Railway Station. One way ticket to Cingjing will cost you NTD 750 per pax. Hm? You don't know which building is the Taipei Railway Station? Okay to make it easier, the building looks like this.
If you take the MRT to Taipei Main Station, go to Exit M4 and take the escalator opposite Starbucks up (to outside) and you will see the exact picture above. Why do I ask you to go to this station? It's simply because the meeting point before boarding the E-go bus is located at East Exit 3 of this building (there are a lot of exits at Taipei Main Station, I don't even want to start). So to help you saving the time of roaming blindly inside Taipei Main Station MRT area, you can just go directly to this building and look for East Exit 3.
For your information, our bus departed at 6.50 AM in the morning. O_O! This is the best timing because the journey to Cingjing Farm will take around 4 hours. So far.
The bus looks like this.
The inside of the bus looks like this. The bus is quite comfortable and there is a guide telling us about the surrounding sceneries (something about a dried up lake) and what to do around Cingjing. Quite helpful I suppose. The guide can speak a bit of English but she shared the whole thing in Mandarin. I guess she only speaks English in term of...emergency?? Hahaha.
How to book a trip with E-go Bus? We asked the help of the minsu owner (fyi, minsu is the other name for guest house located in Cingjing Farm. Visitors usually spend at least one night at minsu because of the long journey time to Cingjing.) For your information, we stayed at Misty Villa. Since we are booking a room there, they are willing to arrange for transportation from Taipei all the way to the guest house. My friend received a confirmation email (complete with the instruction of the meeting point and contact details in English) after she requested for the arrangement.