A Breathtaking and Breathless Weekend in Taiwan

This past weekend (Apr. 2-5) I spent 3 1/2 days in Taiwan. The main point of the trip was to see the island nation for the first time, and I’ll freely admit that I completely underestimated the sheer number of experiences to be had (sights to be seen foods to be tried, etc.) that a small island nation can hold. It’s true that I’m fully aware of the vast number of places, foods, festivals, and other things that Japan (a small island nation) has to offer, but this didn’t factor into the mental calculus when I decided to take a couple of days off during Spring break to visit a place a tenth the size of Japan. Needless to say, I plan to visit again at some point over the next year and a half.

As you can probably tell by the title of my blog post, the trip turned out incredibly well. This was primarily due to a few things: my fantastic host, Sohan Manek, a classmate of mine from Georgetown who now teaches English in Tainan; my Taiwanese friend who lives here in Japan, Iku, who handmade a pamphlet for me of things to see and eat in her homeland, the 1000 little things that can go wrong on a trip that simply didn’t, and of course the perfect weather (about 78 degrees and sunny for most of the time I was there) didn’t hurt either.

The flight from Osaka’s Kansai international airport to Taipei is a brief two hours, and so after getting up at 4:30 AM in Tokushima city and taking a 5 AM bus to the airport, I was able to make it in around noon. While in the immigration line, I noticed a boy wearing a University of Texas sweatshirt and simply had to comment on it- turns out he and his family are from Austin (my home town) and have lived in Shanghai due to his father’s work for the past 4 years. They will return to Austin in the fall and the kids will be heading to St. Andrew’s, my high school’s rival school. Small world. Sohan met me at the airport, and we took off on the 45 minute bus ride into the city (Taipei, I discovered, is like Tokyo, Osaka, and Seoul in that its airport is a fair way outside of the city center itself).

We made it to the city center and headed straight for the Taipei 101, which was the world’s tallest building from 2004-2010- at 509 meters it was the first building in the world to break the half-kilometer mark, and to ascend to the 89th floor observation deck we rode the fastest passenger elevator in the world (took us about 30 seconds to get up there- which I’m pretty sure is less time than it takes the elevators in New South or the Walsh building at Georgetown to make it to the 4th floor). Though the day was cloudy, there were moments of clarity when we were able to see vast swaths of the city. The free audio tour of the building was interesting, though we couldn’t see many of the landmarks that were pointed out to us by the mobile-phone-looking audio device. Sohan and I were particularly amused by the mascots of the building (bomber-man look-alikes called “Damper Babies” with fun names and catchphrases), the fact that Taipei 101 had been certified as the world’s tallest by the Council on Tall Buildings (would love to be a member of this), and the labeling of their Tuned Mass Damper that is designed to stabilize the top of the building against typhoon-force winds (called “Super Big Wind Damper” on the signs).

After descending (an ear-popping experience despite the atmosphere-controlled elevator car) and having lunch, we headed on to our hostel, called “Chocolate Box”. After making the inevitable “you never know what you’re going to get” jokes on the way, I was pretty impressed with the laid-back character, cleanliness, people, and ultimately the location of the hostel- it was within a 5 minute walk of one of Taiwan’s major night markets, two subway (MRT) stations (Guting and one other), and a great deal of late-night spots.

We met up with a friend of mine from when I studied abroad in Japan in high school, Kota, who is now living in Taiwan. We then headed to two of the night markets to find something to eat. Iku’s pamphlet had instructed me to try 6 specific different foods: Zhen-zhu-nai-cha (pearl milk tea), cong-you-bing (scallion cake), chou-dou-fou (stinky tofo), yu-yuan (yams), dan-bing (Taiwan’s version of an omelet), and gan-mei-shu-tiao (sweet potato fries). Of all of these, I was able to eat about half over the weekend, and tried a great number of other things as well. The night markets are basically areas in which the tight warrens of streets are completely lined with stores selling clothing, electronics, house-wares, a multitude of other things, and of course food. We grabbed big cups of the pearl milk tea (or bubble tea, as it’s called back in the States), and made our way through the throngs of people of the night market by our hostel. After having thoroughly explored this one, we decided our dining options weren’t up to snuff, and decided to head to the Shilin night market, the biggest in Taipei. There we looked around the stores for a bit before entering a large building full of cooking smells and people sitting around patio furniture eating any number of mysterious looking things while downing their none-too-creatively dubbed “Taiwan Beer”. We found empty seats at a stall, and ordered a few rounds of steamed pork dumplings, shrimp fried rice, and beer. The meal was delicious, filling, and ended up costing the equivalent of about 8USD ($) between the three of us. Yum. We then headed out in the area around our hostel for a fun-filled night of experiencing the night life in Taipei, mainly at a fun bar called Roxy 99.
The next morning Sohan and I awoke early to catch 9:50 train to Hualien. Unfortunately, we hadn’t been able to reserve seats and so the two of us crammed ourselves into an entry way for the duration of the 2 1/2 hour journey (which wasn’t bad at all). After arriving in Hualien, we checked into the Formosa Backpackers Hostel. I definitely enjoyed this hostel as much as the first- the owner was fun, interesting, and very informative on every topic that we could think of: from the best places to rent (and repair) scooters, buy jade, or grab a beer to the lasting cultural legacy of the Japanese occupation/control of the island for the first half of the 20th century (Taiwan was called “Formosa” under the Japanese). There we met a wide array of fun other foreigners, primarily English teachers living in Taiwan (and one couple that had been on my program in Japan last year).

We then rented a pair of scooters (the equivalent of $15 a piece for 24 hours, man I love Taiwan) to explore Hualien and the surrounding area. This included the Taroko National Park, quite possibly the most awe-inspiring place of natural beauty that I have ever visited (sorry, Niagara Falls, the Cascades, the Rockies, Santa Elena Canyon, etc.). I’ll be putting photos up in a facebook album soon (I’ll post the link as soon as I do), but it’s the first place that I’ve ever been where I felt that I lack the ability (in photography, writing, etc.) to convey the scope of its beauty.

I thought that the wikitravel.org website had a good description of the landscape of the gorge:
“The most phenomenal aspect of the park is the amazing relief. In a single afternoon you can travel from rugged coastal cliffs through a maze of subtropical forested canyons to high elevation subalpine coniferous forests.
In about 20 kilometers the landscape rises from sea level to some of the tallest peaks in Taiwan at over 3800 meters. That's steep!
The force behind the steep valleys and narrow canyons is a (geologically speaking) relatively fast rate of uplift combined with ample water. Over the last 70 million years, these two forces collaborated to form the world's deepest marble canyon. The slot canyons here are remarkable with narrows sections a thousand feet high and only a dozen yards apart, reminiscent of the Virgin River in Zion National Park in Utah, USA. Ignore the fact that Zion is in the desert, and made of sandstone and Taroko is subtropical and comprised of marble, and these two gorges have a lot in common.”
http://wikitravel.org/en/Taroko_Gorge

We drove the scooters up narrow roads that clung to the sides of its massive cliffs while periodically stopping to take pictures or hike to one of the multitude of natural attractions and take pictures. Though most of my time in Taiwan was spent in sunny weather, the overcast skies and low-hanging clouds gave our journey up the gorge almost an ethereal quality as the clouds swirled around the mountain-tops (think the mountains in the movie Avatar). We first stopped at the Eternal Spring Shrine, a building with two waterfalls flowing through it that was located about 50 feet up a 1,000-foot cliff. We then saw the Swallow Grotto, a place where over the summer thousands of birds make their nests in hollows in the canyon wall. After that we walked through the Cave of the Nine Turns before ending our journey in the village of Tienhsian at a Buddhist shrine where we sat down to have spiced tofu and tea. The view was breathtaking heading both into and out of the canyon, as you notice a great deal of things that had been behind you on the way up.

That night we went out for dinner (fried rice) and a couple of drinks at a local bar, where we met a few other foreigners and enjoyed a surprisingly good live act that had covers of everything from Santana to Frank Sinatra. The next day after breakfast we headed first inland through tropical green fields (after taking a wrong turn), and then down along the coast (where we’d originally intended to go). It was striking for me to be able to see the Taroko gorge just 30 minutes from the town one day, and then drive down the gorgeous coastal road the next.

After returning the scooters, we had lunch (dumplings), went shopping for souvenirs, etc., and then headed to the train station. The majority of the afternoon was spent on the train to Tainan, the town where Sohan lives and is teaching English. We got in around 10:00 that night, then went out with his friends to a couple of the bars/clubs that they frequent.

All in all, though it turned out to be a breathless 3-day rush across the island, I am glad that we were able to do so much in such a short amount of time, and had an incredible trip with the places we saw, people we met, and (all the) food we ate. I would definitely recommend a trip to Taiwan, and as I wrote earlier, I’m looking forward to heading back.