The story about Jiufen is that gold was discovered here during Japanese occupation in 1893. You can actually still see the influence of Japanese here. Jiu 九 stands for nine in Chinese and it is said that only nine families/houses could live there in the beginning, hence the name of the place. In the beginning of 1990, this area became a tourist attraction. It became ever more popular after a movie was filmed there.
During Chinese New Year in February, we decided to go there. We took MRT to Zhongxiao Fuxing and exited (Exit 1) to take the Bus No 1062 Keelung Bus all the way to Jiufen. It took nearly 2.5h to reach Jinguashi Park 金瓜石, which is the end station for this bus.
The traffic on the mountain was horrible. I don't know if it was because of Chinese New Year holiday or if it looks like this all the time.
In Jinguashi, there is a gold mine museum and some nice sceneries. You can also see the ocean from here. Nice and cozy. Unfortunately, when we were there, the museum was closed.
After exploring this park, we took a local bus to get down to Jiufen (30 min), which we passed earlier when we arrived to Jinguashi.
I heard there is a market street in Jiufen, but we didn't see it at first when we were on the bus. When we arrived to Jiufen, we saw the market street "The Old Street" immediately. This is a narrow street with lots of people, small stores, restaurants, and coffee shops. We walked thru it and came out on the other side. Beautiful scenery from here as well.
The Old Street.
We also planned to go to Keelung Night Market before heading home to Taipei and the only way to do so was to go to Ruifang by bus and then change to another bus or a train. However, the train didn't go there actually (from what I understood), so we were supposed to take a bus instead just outside the train station. The bus didn't come though. We finally ended up buying train tickets to Taipei instead. From Ruifang to Taipei, it took nearly 1h by the regular train TRA.
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