You love cats and you want to see hundreds of cats all fat and fluffy waiting for you when you alight the train station? I was there last December, meowz...
Right, so there are many ways to get to this wonderful cat (infested) village from Taipei. Granted, its not reachable via mass rapid trains but by the normal inter-city trains and it takes about an hour to get there from Taipei, 台北 main station. Direct trains are not so frequent but you can also choose to board more frequent trains to Ruifang, 瑞芳 and then change to the Pingxi line, 平溪線 that brings you to your destination.
If you are planning a trip to the area, you might as well visit Shifen and Jiufen.
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Courtesy of Taiwan Railways. There are many stations worth stopping
but lets focus on Houtong, 侯硐 for now. |
I visited during the weekdays in winter and there are quite a number of tourist both foreign and local. I think during warmer weather weekends, there would be too many tourists clamouring to take photographs with the cats.
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| Just to be sure you alighted at the correct station. |
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| A useful map of the area surrounding the station for you to find the different coloured cats. |
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| The story of this black nosed cat is that when it was living, it liked to hang around the train station. So they called it the stationmaster cat. |
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| Houtong used to be a coal mining town much like the other towns in the area, and this bowl of noodle was a staple food for the workers. Mining stopped and the population of the town dwindled. Until someone who took pity on stray cats got permission from the local authority to use the town as a place for kitty cats to live in. Today, volunteers feed and give shelter to the cats. |
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| He's feeling quite lucky |
