Location: Pingtung
Distance: 30km Elevation Gain: 1,600m
The rider should be aware that the following is actually two different rides. From the bottom, it’s approx 17km ascent to the village of Jiufawan. (This is a historically significant village of slate houses that has guesthouse options) From this point on the right fork it’s 5km off-road to Pinghe abandoned slate village and 3km on the left fork to Shalawan Waterfall.
For people living in the Kaohsiung/Pingtung area, one of the most iconic rides is to Wutai Village in Pingtung. As an area that gets a lot of tourist traffic, it’s definitely the best-surfaced road in a mountain area. However, the rider must be aware of additional traffic on weekends.
To ride from central Kaohsiung involves a 40-km flat ride to the start of the climb which isn’t very exciting. One option is to take the train to Pingtung station and start from there. This reduces the access route to 20 km.
Provincial Highway No. 24 0km marker starts from the outskirts of central Pingtung. Once you get on this road you stay on it till the very end. At the 20km marker, the rider reaches Sandimen, a busy village with lots of restaurants and convenience stores to stock up.
The information above is identical to our listing for the Wutai ride. The reason for this is that the Majia ride runs parallel to this and is often paired with riders looking for an additional workout. The access to both roads is on County Road No. 185 and they are less than a kilometer apart.
The Majia Rd. appears on maps as the Ping 35 road. There are signs for the Taiwan Indigenous Culture Park which is a turn-off just 1 – 2km up the road. At this intersection, the rider turns right for the climb. For some odd reason 2.5km up this road the number changes to Ping No. 5 Special Rd. and from this point it’s 7.5km to the village. Unfortunately, it’s only good surface for the first 5km then it turns to concrete. The condition is perfectly rideable, but it has something of a corrugated roughness to it which isn’t fun on the downhill.
Most riders will do the 10 – 11km to the village of Majia and turn around, but there is no reason not to continue to the remote slate house village of Jiufawan. Just after the village, there is a 3-way intersection with the left fork clearly marked. It’s 7km of undulating concrete to the gate of the second village with really amazing mountain views all the way up.
On a road bike, this is as far as you go.
For MTB enthusiasts, there are two options open to the rider to continue. First, riding past the village it’s a hard core single track of 5km on really steep terrain to get to the abandoned slate village of Pinghe. You can be sure that you’ll be getting off to walk some of this, but it’s worth the effort for the downhill. Back at Jiufawan, there is a really steep turn-off to the left which leads down to Shalawan Waterfall. The road drops like a stone over rough concrete and some gravel.
There are always lots of hikers and river tracers in this area so it should be easy to find the trail that leads down to the waterfall. This is a proper trail on steep ropes, but it only takes 5 – 10 to get down for a cool-off.
If this is confusing a Relive video is attached below that covers the MTB ride from Majia to Jiufawan- Pinghe – Shalawan Waterfall.
Here are the GPX and KML files.
Taipei Times article with full details on Jiufawan.