Taipei 101

Our last day in Taipei together, so we made an early start (9am is early for Taiwan - nothing usually opens until 11am, but then goes late into the night). We booked online last night to visit Taipei 101, the second tallest building in the world (with the second fastest lift in the world... both thanks to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai!).

Coming early was a good move as we were up very quickly with plenty of room to move around, but the weather wasn't on our side and visibility was rated as poor (non-existent was closer most of the time!). But the star of the show is the Tuned Mass Damper, a 660 ton ball of steel which is suspended over 5 floors between levels 82 to 87. It's designed to absorb and counteract the buildings movement during high winds and moves up to 1m during a typhoon.

It had started to rain lightly as we walked to a local craft market, but they were still setting up... at 11.30am... so we had a bagel, found a cache, and caught the MRT back to our hotel.

KT, DC and Chris are flying home tonight so we finalised bag packing (DC had plenty of space which KT was pleased to fill!), and we escorted them to the MRT station to catch the airport train.

We continued via a couple of caches toward Ningxia Night Market, which was mostly food stalls, and very busy, then wound our way back to the hotel via a decent coffee at Starbucks (which says something about the quality of coffee in Taiwan!)Read more