Yihuality : The Mangroves

Two weeks ago a friend of mine and me went to the Mangroves near Tamsui. We went to the MRT Station Hongshulin. You can directly walk to the Mangrove Swamp Exhibition Center, where you get information about the place. A nice servant of this centre told us that the actual path (a wooden construction leading you through a small part of the mangroves) is out of service because they need to repair it. After short disappointment we went out and just took the path, despite his advice not to do so, and surprisingly there were many other people walking on it, so we had the impression it will not be dangerous. At the very end of the path was a small electric generator and two workers fixing something at the balustrade over the river, we could easily pass them. We even saw people with a bicycle driving through, and there was no sign or anything at the exit (from our point of view) of the path.

We had a nice – but way too short – walk through the mangroves, saw many crabs in different shapes and sizes, dragonflies as larva and grown up in different colours and a huge grasshopper (I would guess Great Green Bush-Cricket, but I am not sure!). The grasshopper was interesting, because we surveyed it digging a whole and we assume it was laying eggs right in front of our eyes. The whole was too deep to look inside and we didn’t want to destroy it, so we cannot be sure.

Here are some pictures to get an impression: