I forgot to post this here, if anyone's interested!

Today I finally got to go to Elephant Mountain. I've seen photos of it on the web, and in the nice gallery they have displayed at the top of 101. I didn't get a chance before to research it on my trips here, and this being my 5th! It's been hard to get a nice day, especially since everyday here is smoggy. I didn't really know how to get there so we headed off around 11am. I'll have to return there on a clear early morning/night to get better shots. All of the photos here haven't been processed yet and I had wished I had a polarizer with me, and something else a bit better with my XTi kit lens. Other than that, I had my Lowepro bag with me which had my 50mm 1.8 and 70-300 IS lenses in it.

A $8 taxi ride headed east from our hotel, passed 101, and a bit further about 5 blocks east. There's an underpass there and we turned right just before it into a residential area. A few turns down some narrow streets brought us to the base of the mountain. The address should be 150 Xinyi Rd. Section 5. I think if you tell your driver to go to Elephant Mountain, he/she should know.



I read up that the hike should be 2hrs, including a lot of stairs so I wasn't sure what to expect. There seemed to be a lot of locals doing the hike and a lot of them were seniors and little kids so I wasn't really worried. I had last hit the hotel gym 2 weeks ago during my 1 month stay, and I had gone to another mountain the other day and I wasn't sore at all.

I should have taken a better photo of the map, but this is how the trail looks. the map indicates how many feet and how many minutes each stop should take to reach I think. There were two outlooks and it only took about 30-40 minutes to get there going up. the entrance has a steep set of stairs which looked a bit intimidating.



Here's that lat/long so you can get the exact location if you Google map it:



There's a few forks in the road, but we figured we would take the other path on the way back so the choice was easy.



After about 30min we got to the look out. it was about 11:40am, and quite sunny with fast moving clouds overhead. There's a distant typhoon approaching and it was misting light rain, not to mention the smog that gives everything in the distance a hazy look. This would look wicked at dawn/dusk! The look out gives a good perspective of how big the tower really is. There's not many places in the city to get a good view of the tower. You have to look straight up around the area in order to see the whole tower. They also fire fireworks off of the building for New Year's which would be a wicked sight! Now I know where to go to get some sweet photos.



Here's another cityscape photo for a different perspective:



Futher beyond the look out, the path continues with easier steps. It's hard to imagine a park exists in the city. There are stray animals living there, local people walking and tons of brush. Then we hit a small park, hovered by a large tower humming like crazy.



This is how it looks on the path. Not a hint of busy city life!


That's about it. It took about 2hrs round trip on the path to explore everything we could find - bottom to top and back. For a late lunch we hit up Shin Yeh for dumplings, and other good food. it should be nearby the area by taxi.