Saturday 13 December 2025
Taiwan
Our family went to Taiwan for a couple of weeks, in Taichung, Taipei and Alishan. It was our first overseas holiday together for many years, and perhaps the opportunity will not come again for a long time. My wife is Chinese and we’d never been to Asia, so it was good to spend some time there.
Things that were good, in no particular order:
- For Taiwan, the weather was good. It’s the winter there, so it wasn’t too hot, and it didn’t rain much, mostly just some light drizzle on a few days.
- Easy to get around without a car. Taiwan has excellent transport infrastructure, especially around Taipei.
- Google Maps is incredibly useful. We lived by it.
- Good, cheap food. Pastries, cakes, desserts, dumplings and many other foods were excellent, and everywhere, and generally very cheap. Love the night markets.
- Din Tai Fung, Haidilao and the Grand Hyatt breakfast buffet were really good.
- My wife speaks Mandarin and reads Chinese which was super helpful, but even without that, most people spoke a bit of English and Google Lens was very helpful for signage.
- The walk up Jiuwu Peak is very nice, with great views over Taipei, and lit at night. That last was a real life-saver.
- Alishan was beautiful, especially the sunrise and sunset on a good day.
- Mount Keelung near Jiufen was a great short hike with excellent views.
- We really enjoyed the Taiwan zoo, with lots of animals we’d never seen before. We especially enjoyed watching one young gorilla ripping a big chunk of wood off a stump and trying to use it as a stepping stone to reach some dangling aerial tree roots.
- The Maokong gondola was an excellent ride, 20 minutes each way. Recommend the glass floor.
- The Taipei miniatures museum was excellent if you like that sort of thing.
- The National Palace Museum is really excellent. It’s a great blessing that those treasures were saved from the Cultural Revolution.
- Taiwan seems to be a really high-trust society, in a good way. E.g. bikes and helmets left everywhere with no apparent concern for theft.
- Just wandering around the city parks on Sunday afternoons to see what was going on was really fun.
- Did I mention the desserts? I have a thing for icy desserts and I was not disappointed.
Things that were less good:
- The TSMC Museum in Hsinchu was mediocre, effectively just some videos, mostly hagiography. Definitely not worth going to Hsinchu just for that.
- We saw practically no wildlife in Alishan, or anywhere else really apart from birds and squirrels in city parks. Partly that’s just because we were in busy places I guess.
Other observations:
- We walked up the Tashan track and didn’t see anything because of fog. Would have been amazing on a good day, probably need to go early in the day.
- Instead of taking the forest train to the sunrise viewing platforms in Alishan, we could have just walked from our hotel in less time (and we did, on our second day).
- In my opinion, while Taiwan has a lot of good food and a lot of extremely cheap food, nearly all of the extremely cheap food is not especially good. That’s fine, except when family members keep wanting to eat the extremely cheap food.
- We went to Shulin beach. It was winter and a bit blustery so I’m not surprised we saw very few people, but there were permanent “no swimming” signs and there didn’t seem to be alternative beaches around. Do Taiwanese people just not want to go to a beach to swim?
- Taiwanese towns are olfactory roulette. You can be smelling delicious pastries or meats and then the wind changes direction and you’re smelling stinky tofu and sewers.
- The Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall is impressive, and how the displays navigate his decidedly mixed legacy is fascinating. I especially noticed that the hall focusing on his life story almost entirely omits losing the civil war to the CCP.
- Compared to New Zealand, the built environment of Taiwan is a curious mix of amazing infrastructure and dilapidated buildings.
- Outside the most modern areas, city street footpath construction seems to be haphazard, perhaps carried out by each property owner? Anyway there are lots of random steps up and down all over the place, even sometimes in underground passages. Just a strange touch of user-unfriendliness in what is otherwise a very user-friendly environment.
- Chinese culture has a great fondness for fixed-size arrays of notable features — “the One Hundred Small Peaks Of Taiwan”, “the Eight Sceneries Of Keelung”, “the Three Hundred Tang Poems”, and so on and on. I guess if you’re a native speaker these phrases carry less of an air of definitiveness than they do in English.
