I've never been able to resist visiting the really tall buildings when there's one nearby. I mean the ones that are or were serious contenders for World's Tallest Building.
I've been up the Empire State Building, the Burj Khalifa, the Petronas Towers, the Canton Tower, the Shanghai World Financial Center, Chicago's Sears Tower (now the Willis Tower), and in Melbourne, our very own Eureka Tower. There's usually a modest fee, a bit of a queue, and spectacular views from the top.
So it was inevitable that I'd find my way up to the top of Taipei 101 while I was there. It's admittedly only the 11th tallest in the world right now, at 509m, but from 2004 to 2010 it was in fact number one.
As usual, there's a not-to-scale wall chart that exaggerates its size, depicting all the others as smaller, whether they are or not.
The entry fee was a bit more than expected, but the 40-minute queuing time was an even more unwelcome imposition.
The view was a problem for me too. Being in the only really big building in town, there's not much else to look at. I found it difficult to get my bearings. It might have worked better in daylight, when it would have been easier to locate the hills I'd been climbing earlier in the day.
So after 20 minutes I was ready to come down again. Except that there was another 40 minute queue to negotiate!I did rather like the open access to the wind vibration dampening ball mechanism, hanging down through the centre of the building. It's a 660 tonne steel pendulum, and it's been known to move by up to one metre during typhoons.
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