HouTong

Last year we went to the Latern Festival in PingXi.

http://mikeess-trip.blogspot.com/2011/02/lantern-festival.html

PingXi is one of the small towns on the railroad going from Taipei to Ilan. In the past, these small towns were mining towns, mostly coal and gold. But now the mines have played out and the towns are getting smaller. Being close to Taipei, they are an excellent tourist destination and the Taiwan Railroad promotes this tourism with a special ticket that let's you jump on and jump off anywhere along the route.

So we took the train from Taipei to RuiFang and bought the on and off ticket for the small towns on the way to Ilan. Since the construction of the XueShan tunnel there is even less train traffic to Ilan from Taipei.

http://tainanchineseclass.blogspot.com/2010/01/trip-to-ilan-1.html

RuiFang is the biggest town along the route, a good place to pick up the train schedule and plan the day. Weekdays are best, avoid the crowded weekends.

HouTong has a double feature to promote it as a tourist destination. One is the old coal mining structures that are left from t=when the mines were abandoned in 1972.

There is a Museum and at the visitor's center there is a model of what the mine looked like in its heyday.

The railroad through the mountains follows the Keelung river and there are beutiful sites from the bridges that once carried the coal to the railroad loading docks.

The other Houtong tourist attraction is that HouTong is overrun with feral cats.
They play on this "feature" and most of the tourists are taking pictures of the local cats.

 They are not really feral cats, as the city government provides them with food and water.

I don't think the web needs anymore pictures of cute cats, cute cat pictures are probably one of the reasons the internet is so slow. Just load up your browser with: cats taiwan and houtong and you'll get an eyefull.