What about your trip

Espacio Google

Taiwan as a sightseeing destination

Chiang Kaishek's mausoleum in Taipei

A trip through east Asia would not, ordinarily, include Taiwan, but it is worth visiting for those with a lot of time.

For such a small island, Taiwan has a remarkable number of places offering natural scenery, the three major ones being Taroko Gorge (tailuge), Jade Mountain (yushan) and Ali Mountain (alishan). Indeed, the eastern half of the island is virtually uninhabited mountains, which are straddled by the cross-island highways linking the coastal roads.

The best transport in Taiwan runs along the western plain, which is where 90% of the country's 23 million people live. There is Highway 1, which runs from Jilong to Gaoxiong, and is paralleled by the old railway lines. Then there is the new, high-speed railway, on which you can zip up and down the western plain in several hours.

There are also numerous inter-city buses, but finding the stations and determining which bus goes where can be a chore. Once, while trying to take a bus from one city to another, I was sold a ticket and asked to wait for an hour. After pacing up and down rather unexciting, concrete streets, I caught the bus, only to be driven a few blocks in the opposite direction of my destination and dropped off at another small depot. Here, I was asked to wait another hour. Naturally, I used such Mandarin as I have to express my rancor. Despite their difficulties, buses in Taiwan are a good way to move around, and frequently depart at more convenient times than the trains.

Most of Taiwan's train stations were built by the Japanese during their occupation, which lasted from 1895 to 1945. You can easily recognize the Japanese colonial style, which is a kind of orientalised neoclassic. In some cities, notably Taipei, the old Japanese train station has been torn down and replaced with a modern-style one. Waiting in line to buy a ticket can be draining, but you can make reservations online, assuming the site hasn't crashed.

Once in a city, you may find the public buses too infrequent or inconvenient, and, unless you can read some Mandarin characters, or know the characters for the neighbourhood where you wish to alight, it is probably better to take a taxi. A word to the wise, though: oriental taxi drivers often do not know their way around their own towns. Therefore, you should write the address and phone number of your destination--a hotel, say, or a restaurant--on a piece of paper. Give it to the cabbie, who can call the place on his mobile while he is driving (this is dangerous, but necessary) and get directions in his native tongue. If you do this, you will notice that it takes a considerable amount of jabbering back and forth before the cabbie understands where to steer his vehicle.

As far as historical sites in Taiwan, they are like anywhere else in the orient. Despite its 5,000-year history, there are probably more extant buildings over 50 years of age in California, not to mention Europe, than in all of east Asia. Even with having escaped the sledge hammering of the Cultural Revolution, Taiwanese towns offer only a little in the way of original structures, although there are eighteenth- and nineteenth-century structures, especially temples, to be found.

Taipei is the premier city for everything, and its main attraction is the Palace Museum, which houses all the treasures from the Forbidden City in Beijing that Chiang Kaishek stole, then transported to Taiwan when he fled there in 1949. In each of the major west coastal cities, notably Hsinchu, Taichung, Lugang and Tainan, there are some ancient structures left, along with museums. For recreation, there is Kenting, a tiny resort town at the very southern tip of the island, that has some good western restaurants, and decent hotels facing the beach. Taiwan also abounds in hot springs, and many resorts featuring steaming water from the earth's crust dot the country.

Taipei's train station

Sent by Hal Swindall (01-04-08)

Espacio reservado