Stinky tofu, and other culinary delights

After a fabulous breakfast of scrambled eggs, steamed buns, porridge, rice, vegetables and toast, we met our driver Steven to begin our tour of Taiwan.

Being Saturday morning, the roads are full of locals heading away for day trips out of Taipei, so progress was very slow at times, despite being on a 4 lane freeway with additional raised lanes on both sides.

We arrived at Longfeng Broken Bridge in time for morning tea, and Oliver jumped right in the deep end with a Taiwanese specialty - black stinky tofu (the name is extremely accurate). She and Steven had most of it, but everyone had a taste.

We continued through the mountains on to Shengxing Railway Station, a town which was bypassed by the railway many years ago, and uses that, and its Hakka heritage, as a tourist attraction (think Hahndorf with noodles instead of wurst ☺). We also made some traditional pound tea by grinding herbs, peanuts and seeds in a mortar and pestle before adding hot water to make tea.

We then drove to Taichung via the Rainbow Village, a former veterans village which was painted from head to toe in bright murals by one of the residents in a bid to save it from demolition. He is in his 90s now, and although no lives there anymore (it is purely for tourists), he was in the village today and happy to pose for photos for a small fee.

Next stop was the Fengjia night market, famous for its imaginative food and drinks. It was here that bubble tea was invented, so we sampled sweet potato balls, fried quail egg balls, a hot dog in a hot dog (a pork sausage inside a rice sausage "roll"), deep fried suckling pig omelet, and a watermelon milk drink. We walked for over 2 hours and covered about half the market, so you'll get an idea of it's size!

A short drive across town had us at our hotel around 8pm.Läs mer