I: The Occasional Visitor to Taiwan

   The island Taiwan, with an area of only 36,000 km2, is home to about 23 million people and is hence one of the most densely populated places in the world. It is a prosperous country, which means that as a visitor you will almost always share the attractive sites with about a thousand others. Of course they have just as much right as we do to enjoy what nature or their compatriots have to offer, except we do wish that they would choose another day for their sightseeing instead. And Taiwanese have now started to enjoy the call to travel, so you will soon, in a few years, many more Taiwanese traveling all over the world

   There is an interesting statistic which may be indicative of this trend. I happen to be a regular contributor of reviews to Tripadvisor and these cover many of the places you can see in this website. My most recent monthly update, dated April 7, 2015 (yes, there are statistics everywhere of what you do) shows that I have written 82 reviews, and some 69,975 readers have read my blatherings, which did not prevent some 118 individuals to award me their vote for helpful reviews. But the point I wish to make is that of these 69,975 readers, all of them interested in traveling, 28 % are from the USA, 15 % are from Taiwan !!!, 7 % are from Singapore, and 50 % are from other countries. You can see which countries most of the tourists originate from. Remember, there are 10 times as many people in the USA as in Taiwan.

right: This is in short what Taiwan looks like for the occasional visitor. It is a land with very scenic views, such as Sun Moon Lake; it is also a land where a zillion, mostly Chinese tourists visit in those spots. Here you can see people standing in a queue from the right to have their pictures taken next to a stele, reading Sun Moon. But people do wait patiently their turn and stand orderly behind each other in the designated line.

    Another problem for foreigners are the relatively few locals who speak English, which strikes one as rather unusual. After all, there is a considerable amount of political assistance the USA has provided to Taiwan in their standoff with mainland China. I suppose this is because the Chinese-speaking world is so numerous, that the inhabitants have little incentive to learn an additional language. Just look at the USA, where most non-recent-immigrants do not speak another language besides English. Chinese is difficult to the Western ear. Similarly, English is a difficult language to learn for the native Chinese.

    Many years ago, when I first visited Russia, I felt completely at a  loss, because I did not understand a single sign. Since then I learned the Cyrillic alphabet; the Greek I mastered in college during my training as a chemical engineer. You may not know a language, but if you spell out the separate words in Cyrillic or Greek, you’ll find to your surprise that you actually understand quite a bit of what is printed. Because many of the words are similar to what you already know in other languages. Now when I am in Moscow, I would not hesitate to take the underground.

    With Chinese you also run into this problem, but it is worse. There is no Chinese alphabet you can learn. I speak and read a little bit of Chinese, so I’ll survive, but I can imagine the helplessness of being in Taiwan, because very often there are just no additional signs in English. In contrast, Hong Kong does not have this disadvantage.

    So the choice is to get a local guide, or learn Chinese to get around. Otherwise it would be hard to go into that interesting-looking local restaurant and get a decent meal of their specialties. Chinese is definitely not the easiest language. To complicate matters, there is also Taiwanese, which is a dialect derived from the southern part of Fujian province in China which lies just across the island.

    Taiwan is home to a number of aboriginal tribes; its original inhabitants. Aboriginal culture and artifacts go back some 8,000 years. They are now a minority to the Han population, who poured in when and after Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist army fled across from mainland China.

    The Japanese ruled over them for half a century from 1895 to 1945, and I suspect you can around get quite well in Japanese, especially with the older Taiwanese generation. In 1895 Taiwan was ceded to the Japanese after the defeat of a weaker China under the Qing dynasty; in 1945 after WW II, Taiwan returned to China under General Chiang Kai-shek. During the later years of Japanese rule, the colonial Government strongly encouraged the Taiwanese to speak Japanese, wear Japanese clothing, live in Japanese-style houses, and even convert to Shintoism. Many Taiwanese youth even volunteered for the Japanese Army during WW II. In Taiwan resentment of the Japanese is therefore very low compared to the rest of the Chinese world.

    For instance, take a business card of a restaurant we like. More often than not its address is only in Chinese characters, so I can’t even Google the place. One of the members of our party, whose office is in the Netherlands has been doing business for decades with Taiwan, so he has many business associates. When they entertain, it is rather surprising how little English is used. When they come with their spouses, English is even less known to them.

    Taiwan has a high mountain range running north south through the center of the island. Because the land is geologically quite young, it is steep and craggy. The high humidity and subtropical weather results in the formation of lush forests. We see rice fields, sugar cane, pineapples, guavas, lichees, bananas, and many other tropical fruits. There are also an abundance of betel palm in cultivation. The betel nut for chewing has been used for centuries here. The high humidity also results in some of the very scenic sights in the mountains, especially in the Taroko Gorge region.

II: Tour of Taiwan.

    We flew into Taipei from Hong Kong on Hong Kong Airlines.  Taipei has two major airports. Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport (TPE) is for international flights into Taipei. It is located some 40 kms from downtown Taipei, so you have to take a bus, train, or taxi to get to your hotel. Taking the bus or the trains is very inexpensive, but you may run into communication problems. Closer to town is the smaller Taipei Shongshan Airport (TSA), which used to be an international gateway, but is now used mainly for domestic flights.

    We opted to be picked up by Dustin Wu from Topology Travel, who charged us NTD (New Taiwan dollars) 1,000, equivalent to about USD 33.70. He dropped us in Riviera Hotel, in the Hongshan district of Taipei, our base of operation for the city. A taxi would cost slightly more. It was still an one-hour drive over very good highway, which at some places parallel highways ran on different levels.

    If you want to tour Taiwan for a few days you will note that most tour companies push a “standard”  5-day tour. This choice is made for expediency, because they know most tourists do not want to spend much more days on an island like Taiwan. Certainly, you can cover most of the sights worth seeing in this period, but there would be a lot of driving involved, a lot of very early wake-up calls while time spent at various sights would be limited. In hindsight we were glad we did not make this choice, although it is quite useful for others with different needs.  What we ended up with was a 9-day tour; of which three days were in Taipei and environs and the balance around the island.

    Public transportation is very good. Taipei has an speedy underground system for intra-city travel. There are lots of buses crisscrossing the area and taxis are fairly inexpensive. High-speed modern trains charge little to take you from one place of the island to another. Surprisingly however, it is actually quite difficult for an independent traveler to get around in Taiwan, if he/she does not speak or read Chinese, and because there is obviously a culture bias between the Taiwanese and the Western world. But if you have a good (or even a mediocre) guide to get you around, you will certainly enjoy the visit better. Just avoid being amidst the sweltering humid heat between June and September.  October to December is best, but there may be an occasional typhoon to spoil the fun.

    Taiwan is a wonderful place for food; all Chinese love good food for centuries. The country is awash in restaurants and little eating hole-in-the-walls, and none would survive if their fare was lousy. Taiwan has excellent Chinese as well as Japanese restaurants everywhere. Even the littlest stall on and along the main thoroughfares serve tasty meals for little money.

    Except when they serve the aboriginal cuisine, which is nothing to rave about, but I suppose you have to try this at least once as visitor.

    You go to Din Tai Fung’s Tienmu restaurant in Taipei, the only one Michelin star in Taiwan.  At first sight  it looks like a high school cafeteria. But their Xiaolongbao buns are out of this world.

left: The handmade Xiaolongbao buns served right from the steamer. You bite in them and the wonderful juices inside explode in your mouth.

 

   We were there in September, 2013 when the powerful typhoon Usagi moved from Taiwan in the direction of Hong Kong. The typhoon hit Taiwan when we were in still in Hong Kong, and the hurricane was scheduled to hit Hong Kong on September 22. The whole city was busy with emergency preparations. But we left Hong Kong a day earlier.  This typhoon, the strongest in 2013, killed at least 25 people, so we were lucky that our schedule called for us to leave Hong Kong just a day before. Our plane route made a wide berth and we landed in Taipei. The typhoon had struck the island the day before and had already left by the time we arrived. So we missed the typhoon both in Hong Kong as well as in Taipei. For which we thanked our guardian angel, whoever she or he may be.