My trip highlight up Mt. Hehuan done and lunch at Inako Valley View Restaurant done, it’s the kids’ turn for this trip’s main event: a visit to Cingjing Farm. The Farm is a pretty large area – around 760 hectares from what I read – and is divided into two parts: the sheep pasture, and also a horse ranch, both of which are separated by a market that offers local produce and street food. The Farm at 1,748m attitude is situated a few hundred meters lower than Cotswold villa but enjoys the same cool climate. Unfortunately, the afternoon sun was in full force bearing down on us at the time we visited: around 1:20PM onwards, which made things just a little more humid, and gave all of us a good tan by the time we left!
Admissions for the four of us was NTD420/SGD19 – NTD160 for adults, NTD80 for Hannah – and NTD20(?) for Peter – not quite sure how that worked! There are also numerous sheep food dispensers throughout the farm, though many of them were already empty at the time of our just after lunch visit, which meant that many visitors had to ‘pretend’ to have food for the sheep by cupping their hands to lure them over. Each food pack is NTD10/SGD0.45, and we bought seven – and that wasn’t enough for the two kids even! The sheep go through them really fast, and if you’re food-scarce, you’d really need to ration them out if you want to stretch your photo opportunities as much as you can.
Big question: are the sheep tame, and are they timid? Yes actually to both. There are no rough sheep about, or so I concluded because there weren’t any advisories about what we shouldn’t do these farm resident, quite unlike the house rules regarding Alpacas that we were briefed on at Margaret River last year. And while I’m sure the sheep are human-densitized at this point from the thousands who visit Cingjing farm every year, they are still a little skittish when you approach them. As animals ago, and this applies to our pair of guinea pigs too, their heart is through their mouths! So, offer them food and they’ll come to you.
There were quite a few visitors during our mid-day visit, which made photo-taking a little challenging since everyone wants to engage the sheep for different reasons: some visitors were more interested in posing selfies with the sheep (there was one particularly rude Chinese man from a certain country north of Taiwan who kept shoving into a picture I was trying to take of the kids – just for his damn selfie with sheep), H and P were more interested in feeding sheep, and I was more interested in taking photos of our kids feeding them haha.
There’s also a lot of sheep poop about, but there’s really no point trying to avoid them even if you’re poop-adverse. Only way to is to stay on the paved walkways!
Our last stop for Day 05 before we headed back to Taichung was at Swiss Garden, but we didn’t visit the Gardens itself. So, the next post is for Day 06 in Hualien.
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