Taipei is a bustling city with both modern and aged structures, but it also has its share of nature. Xiangshan, or Elephant Mountain, is the city's claim to a hike, and is actually found in many guides for Taipei, in both digital and electronic publications. At about a kilometre and a half with a wonderful view of the city, it's very easy to see why the trail is a popular attraction: it's reward is excellent for the effort involved.
After having some lunch in the Xinyi district, we walked to the start of the start of the trail. The closest station, named after the mountain itself, was our landmark. Xiangshan station was about a ten minute walk from the start of the trail itself, which was located next to a very colourful temple. The beginning was marked with some signs in Chinese, with a signpost nearby pointing to the MRT station and to the Liu Ju Shi viewing platform. This platform is the popular site for tourists. On further research, there are several entrances to the trail, and all of them seemed to lead to Liu Ju Shi.
All of these entrances all seem to have something in common: stairs. The trail we took, and from what my research has turned up, was less of a trail and more of a flight of stairs. There were handrails for the most part, but there were some places where balance was key, especially with the density of people going up and down the route. The stairs themselves were stone and they were quite stable and even, so slipping wasn't a big problem. The difficulty lay in their heights.
All throughout the trail there was a crowd, and there was rarely any times when we wouldn't have people within arms reach of ourselves. The visitors to this trail varied from children to seniors. There was also a fair amount of Japanese visitors as well. The Japanese was really easy to pick out amongst the crowd after having lived in Japan for a while. What was interesting to note was the attire most people wore. Very few people wore any athletic clothing, myself included. I even remember one older gentleman wearing a dress shirt and business-casual trousers near the top of the trail.
That being said, the people that did wear athletic clothing were very serious about the trip up and down. I remember one guy that passed us three times as we went up the mountain. He passed us on his descent as we were climbing, then he caught up to us as we were still going up. He passed us once more later on. He wasn't the only one on this trail at breakneck speed.
The climb worked up a bit of a sweat, but all in all it took roughly a half hour to forty-five minutes to get to Liu Ju Shi. There were large amounts of people here, all taking photos of the view. The internet famous shot with the photo subject sitting on a rock was in the area, and the particular rock in question was busy with many tourists trying for the same shot. My girlfriend and I settled for a selfie with Taipei 101 on he background just under the rock. There were too many people to wait out to get the famous rock shot, and being in the afternoon there were bound to be more people incoming.
The way back down felt a bit dangerous. As previously mentioned, some areas did not have any handrails installed, and the step heights could be quite high. Climbing these areas was no problem, but going down them was a challenge. By the time we were ready to head back down, our legs had received enough of a workout to be in a somewhat weakened state, so each step down relied on secondary muscles for control. Factoring in the density of people, we took extra care not to run into anyone.
When we reached the start of the trail, we were satisfied and made our way back to the Taipei 101 area. All in all, the trail from start to finish took about an hour and a half. Visitors can plan to have the rest of the available if they want to.
Thanks for reading!