The Taipei City Government will offer guided English hiking tours on the Tianmu Shuiguan trail on Saturday, and plans to expand the service to hiking activities on another 20 trails.
The guided tour will be held to promote the natural beauty of the trail and the history of Taipei City.
To attract members of the foreign community, the hiking tour will be available in English for the first time, the city government said yesterday.
Huang Li-yuan (黃立遠), a division chief at Taipei City’s Department of Economic Development, said the department cooperated with the ROC Natural Trail Association to train more than 400 guides to offer tours on 20 mountain trails in and around Taipei.
As many foreigners live in Tianmu, the department decided to start with an English guided tour there on Saturday. The English tours on the other 20 trails will be offered intermittently, he said.
Chang Yu-chuan (張尤娟), secretary-general of the association, said the 1.1km trail was built by the Japanese in the 1930s to facilitate work on a drain to let spring water flow from the mountain, so the trail was named Shuiguan (water pipe) Road.
The Tianmu Shuiguan Road also connects with the Old Tianmu Trail (the ancient path of Tianmu), which leads to the third water purification plant. The hiking tour on Saturday will include an introduction to the trail’s history and its ecosystem, she said.
Interested hikers should register with the association in advance. The hiking activity is limited to 300 participants in total, and the English tour is open to 20 foreigners.
Huang said the association would seek to offer English and Japanese guided tours at other trails if more foreigners are interested in participating in the hiking activities.
For registration and more information about other guided hiking tours offered by the department, please call 1999 ext. 6631 or call the association at 02-2358-3839.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching