Day 7: There's Gold In Those Mountains! (And Sky Lanterns)

 

 Saturday started off with a long bus ride into the mountains.

Our tour guide Jenny

  We toured an old gold mining town and saw the residence built for the crown prince of Japan at the time (but he became emperor right after it was finished so he never visited)

    The main street was really packed and winding as we tried to make it through the crowd and stay together to get to the restaurant where we had lunch reservations. 

   Then after a little bit of wandering around and shopping we got back on the bus to go to another town for the "sky lantern" experience a lot of people had been talking about for days.  I don't believe in it, but that doesn't mean it wasn't really fun.

The hardest part was filling up all 4 sides

   Basically we stood on a set of train tracks holding a paper balloon with a huge wad of fire inside it...

   Every so often a whistle would sound and everyone would hurry off the tracks before a train came through

   They looked really cool in the air though.

   The bus ride back was really long most people got off at the hotel but I went wandering around with Shelly, sadly I wasn't used to the nighttime settings on my new camera so the only one that turned out was of part of the Ferris wheel we went on.

   We went back to the hotel to see who wanted to come to the hot springs and picked up Laura and Theresa. It took us two MRT trains and a 15ish minute walk to get there but it was worth it.

Interesting statue at the Xinbeitou station (where the hot springs are)
 

   We didn't go to the public hot springs, we went to the ones where everyone has their own individual room with their own tub and you get 40 minutes. It was super relaxing and we didn't get back to the hotel until almost 1 AM.