Taiwan 2018

A 20-day adventure by Darren and Janet Read more

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Trip start
November 24, 2018
Taiwan 2018 Darren and Janet
Night flight to Honkers
November 24, 2018 in Australia ⋅ 🌧 13 °C
Adelaide Airport, Saturday night, ready for the much anticipated family holiday ... and did a virtual cache on the way in. It doesn't get much better than that. ☺

Everyone has their own app... Chris has Travefy, KT and DC on Facebook, me on Find Penguins, Oliver has Notebook 1.0. Here she is sharing her app...

Good flight, arrived 45 minutes early and an hour before the first train to the city, so plenty of time to... sit and wait.Read more
TravelerEnjoy Honkers - what's on the itinerary whilst you are there? Fritz came for a visit this afternoon and enjoyed barking madly to protect her patch from Richie and Jagger. Grandma M stayed over last night with Fritz - sleeping arrangements unknown as yet!
11/25/18Reply
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Taiwan 2018 Darren and Janet
Long day on Lantau
November 25, 2018 in Hong Kong ⋅ 🌧 15 °C
We arrived at 4.10am and caught the first train to the city at 5.50am. After a quick train change at Central we arrived at our hotel at 7am. Unsurprisingly our rooms won't be ready for a number of hours, so we decided to tackle our longest planned day - a trip to Lantau Island (back where the airport is!).

To get back to Lantau we caught a bus to the ferry terminal, then ferry to Mui Wo on the east coast of the island. After a walk around town, a failed attempt for a cache, and a bakery visit, we had a winding, mountainous bus trip across the island to Tai O, a traditional Chinese stilted fishing village on the west coast... and all before 10.30am!

Tai O, on the Pearl River delta, is also home to the rare pink dolphin, so we went for a boat trip through the village and toward the new Hong Kong-Macau bridge in search of some. We spotted one, which considering there are less than 50 left in the wild, is pretty good.

It started to drizzle as we walked through the market, sampling some cuttlefish balls on the way, so we caught the next bus to Ngong Ping, home of the Big Buddha. It was raining properly by now, so we decided against climbing the 250 steps to the top and headed for Ngong Ping 360, a 5.7km cable car ride with views across the South China Sea, national park and airport. We knew it was all out there sonewehere, but the cloud was so low we had times we couldn't even see the carriage ahead of us!

We caught the train back to the hotel, KT had a snooze and Oliver, DC and I went out in search of food. We settled on the accurately named Queen Street Cooked Food Market for some delicious noodle and rice dishes, then a quick trip to the supermarket for supplies.

KT and Chris frequented the same food hall and got the full theatre of washing your own crockery before you eat, and complimentary tea service, then we all went to the coffee shop downstairs to discuss the next day's agenda over hot chocolates ☺Read more
TravelerAppears your rain is heading to Adelaide right now! Lawn mowing today b4 it arrives.
11/25/18Reply
sam and bruceNice to see your great pics. So many interesting places to explore! Hope the weather clears for you.
11/26/18Reply
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Taiwan 2018 Darren and Janet
Star Ferry and Ladies Market
November 26, 2018 in Hong Kong ⋅ 🌙 19 °C
We had a more leisurely start today, leaving the hotel just after 9am for a walk to the ferry terminal to catch the historic Star Ferry across Victoria Harbour to Kowloon.

With a few detours for caches, we walked through Kowloon Park to the Hong Kong Scout Association, who have a large museum as part of a Scout branded hotel, which is also the tallest Scout building in the world!

After lunch at a small noodle and dumpling restaurant we walked via the Temple Street night market (not much happening during the day), to the Ladies Market. This was very busy and continued for many blocks, so by the time we reached the other end we were ready for a train trip back to the ferry terminal.

We spotted the Space Museum on the walk fron the train station, so DC paid a vist while we had coffee and cake at nearby Starbucks.

We caught the Star Ferry back to Hong Kong Island and ventured up to a rooftop garden in search of another cache. Apart from a great view, there was also a burger bar on the rooftop with outdoor seating, so we stopped there for tea and enjoyed the harbour lights.

The journey back to the hotel was partly via the Central–Mid-Levels Escalator, the world’s longest outdoor covered escalator system (800m in length with a 135m rise in elevation).Read more
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Taiwan 2018 Darren and Janet
Ding Ding to The Peak
November 27, 2018 in Hong Kong ⋅ 🌧 17 °C
We caught the Ding Ding this morning, the double deck narrow gauge tram that runs past the front of our hotel, then walked to the lower station of the Peak Tram, the funicular up to Victoria Peak.

Victoria Peak is where the classic photos of Hong Kong are taken, and the crowds were indicative of its popularity. Most people take some photos at the peak, do some shopping, then go back down, but we did the 90 minute walk around the Peak Track, a 3km circumnavigation of the peak. We got some great views of the docks and outlying areas on a very quiet (and pleasantly flat) track.

Atfer a spot of lunch, and a rainbow cheese toastie for KT, we caught the funicular back down and walked to the underground station via Hong Kong Park, and visited the world's most expensive tree - a bit like the Burnside gum, this banyan tree was preserved when the area was redeveloped, at an estimated cost of A$4 million.

During our walks we have been surprised by the lack of cars on the road (but the trains and trams are packed!), and the cars are either taxis or luxury vehicles. DC decided to count the Tesla's today and got to 24! (turns out HK had very attractive rebates for electric vehicles and sold 2900 in one month before the rebates were removed. By comparison, Australia sold 1400 for the whole year)

The rain started again mid afternoon, so we ate locally at the Queen Street Cooked Food Market again for tea - highlight this time was the crispy pork in scrambled egg!Read more
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Taiwan 2018 Darren and Janet
STANLEY!!
November 28, 2018 in Hong Kong ⋅ ⛅ 20 °C
We took a trip down south today to the Victor Harbor of Hong Kong, Stanley!

We caught the local bus via the Aberdeen Tunnel and Repulse Bay (home to a Ferrari and Tesla dealership!), and arrived just in time for morning tea - egglette (egg waffle) has become KT's favourite.

We wandered the market, went for a beach walk (yes, there was a cache involved!) and had lunch in a backstreet noodle establishment (generous serve of mains were $5 each, compared to the waterfront where a gourmet cheese toastie was $20 at the "English pub").

We caught the bus back to Causeway Bay (and found where all the traffic is in Hong Kong), visited Lot No 1 (the first parcel of land auctioned off by the British after the claimed the colony), and the Noonday Gun (as mentioned in Noel Coward's Mad Dogs and Englishmen).

Street food for dinner tonight, literally! We bought pork buns, rice and other items of unknown ingredient from a small shop front and ate them on the street ☺

Today's Tesla count: 75+ (he stopped counting!)Read more
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Taiwan 2018 Darren and Janet
Macau - tower, casino's and tarts
November 29, 2018 in Macao ⋅ 🌙 22 °C
We departed the hotel just after 9am for a walk to the ferry terminal, bound for Macau. After taking a while to find the ticket counter, we bought tickets for the 10.45am departure, but were also told to line up in the standby queue for the 10.15am ferry... and got on that quite easily!

On arrival in Macau we caught the hotel free shuttle bus, checked in to one room and caught the local bus to the Macau Tower. After a quick lunch, including our first Portuguese egg tart, KT and Chris braved the Skywalk, a vertigo inducing walk around an outside platform 322m up, secured by only a cable! The rest of us stayed inside and enjoyed the views across Macau and mainland China.

After a cuppa and another egg tart, we caught one of the casino shuttle buses to the Cotai Strip, a Las Vegas style extravaganza of massive buildings, neon lights and copies of famous world attractions. We had a ride in "the world's highest figure of eight ferris wheel", suspended between 2 towers of the Studio City casino (we suspect it's the only one in the world!).

Unfortunately we then made the mistake of entering The Venetian, a labyrinth of shops, complete with canals and gondolas, and spent the best part of an hour trying to find our way out! We found out later it's the largest casino in the world... no wonder it seemed to go on forever!

By the time we emerged it was dark, so we caught a free shuttle to another casino near our hotel - the casino's are only too pleased to take you if they think you'll spend some money at their establishment, so they are a popular form of transport between the islands.

Tea was a Mecanese and Portuguese buffet at the hotel (and more egg tarts), followed by a trip to the supermarket and a quick swim for KT, DC and Chris before bed.Read more
TravelerWow! Isn't it bungee jumping from Macau Tower?
11/29/18Reply
TravelerMatching T-shirts too?
11/30/18Reply
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Taiwan 2018 Darren and Janet
The Ruins of St Paul
November 30, 2018 in Macao ⋅ ☀️ 23 °C
Sightseeing day, starting with a bus trip to the southern island to visit Scout Headquarters, which is housed in an old fort.

Our return bus trip took us to the number one tourist attractions in Macau, Senado Square and The Ruins of St Pauls, along with hordes of other tourists.

Senado Square is a central meeting place where they hold community events and is surrounded by laneways lined with shops and market stalls. The tourist masses form a slow moving human train from Senado Square up to the Ruins of St Pauls, the facade of a 17th century church that was destroyed by fire in 1835.

We walked back to the hotel for our late checkout and to catch the hotel shuttle to the ferry terminal. The ferry check in was integrated with the airport system, so we were able to book our bags through to Taipei.

We took off about 20 minutes late for our 1 hour 40 minute flight to Taipei, negotiated their e-gate process on arrival, then caught the MRT train to the city of Chungli for our accommodation for the night, in preparation for the start of our tour tomorrow.Read more
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Taiwan 2018 Darren and Janet
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Stinky tofu, and other culinary delights
December 1, 2018 in Taiwan ⋅ 🌫 20 °C
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.Read more
Traveler Interesting combo!
3/13/20Reply
Traveler OMG so cute haha
3/13/20Reply
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Taiwan 2018 Darren and Janet
From Lugang to the Sun (Moon Lake)
December 2, 2018 in Taiwan ⋅ 🌙 16 °C
First stop of the day was Lugang Township, formerly the busiest port town in Taiwan, where we visited a temple and had a walk around the old town. On the way we sampled the local specialty, shrimp monkeys (deep fried mud shrimp, eaten whole including head and legs).

On the way out of town we drove through a rural area, past a traditional cemetery and stopped at a Shell Temple in Fuxing Township. It's a little-visited labour of love that took one man 20 years to build, covering his own temple inside and out, with sea shells (all but 2 of the temples in Taiwan are privately owned, by individuals or not -for profits organizations)

The drive to Sun Moon Lake was mostly on raised freeways and through tunnels, so we made good time, arriving in time for a shuttle boat cruise - a fleet of boats visit 3 ports around the lake and you hop-on and off at your leisure.

Sun Moon Lake is the most popular tourist destination in Taiwan - we counted 30 tour buses in one of the car parks, mostly from mainland China (although the Taiwanese government is actively promoting tourism from other east Asian countrtries to minimise their reliance on China if the political situation deteriorates).

Tea was in the night market again, but as it's not a major city, it was starting to shut down as we walked back to the hotel at 7.30pm.Read more
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Taiwan 2018 Darren and Janet
High tea in Alishan
December 3, 2018 in Taiwan ⋅ ⛅ 11 °C
After breakfast we had a quick bike ride along the walking trail before departing Yuchi township. Our first stop was Wenwu Temple on the shores of Sun Moon Lake. It is dedicated to Confucus and two Chinese generals, and is the largest temple we've visited so far.

On the way to Alishan we visited the Collapsed Temple, a victim of a 7.2 magnitude earthquake in 1999 known by the locals as "9-21". We sampled Century Eggs in the local market - a preserved egg with a jelly like consistency... and it was better than expected! Lunch was in Chungpu - local specialty, turkey rice.

Our destination for the day is Alishan, home of the forest railway, and Taiwan's hiking and tea growing centre. We had a stop on the way at Fenqihu Station to walk the old street and view the original steam engines, circa 1910.

We arrived at Alishan in time for a walk to Alishan House, a Japanese era hotel, and the best place in town to watch the sunset from their rooftop deck. Tea was in a small restaurant in the market and an early night ready for an early start tomorrow.Read more
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Taiwan 2018 Darren and Janet
Waiting for the crack of dawn
December 4, 2018 in Taiwan ⋅ ⛅ 29 °C
4.30am wake-up call this morning so we can catch the 5.30am train to Zhushan station, then a short, steep uphill walk to "Ogasawara Mountain Sun-rising Watchtower", the best place in the area to see the sunrise. It's a popular event in these parts, the train was standing room only.

The train line originally went from Chiayi to Alishan (80km), but was damaged in the 9-21 earthquake in 1999. Repairs were competed in 2005, but it was damaged again in Typhoon Morakot in 2009, and remains unrepaired. The section we are traveling on is now just for tourists, from Alishan Township to the summit.

We arrived at the lookout at 6am, and did the important stuff first - found the cache up there☺ (it's now our highest altitude found cache, at 2449m).

After watching the sunrise and squeezing between the bus loads of selfie-stick wielding Chinese tourists to take some photos, we caught the train back to the village for breakfast (local breakfast today, our hotel doesn't have a dining room... or a lobby, comfy bed or lift... but that's another issue!)

After breakfast we met our driver at 9am for a lovely walk up and down and around the forest - according to Chris' app we walked up the equivalent of 57 flights of stairs!

We departed for Kaohsiung at 10.30am

To be continued...Read more
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Taiwan 2018 Darren and Janet
Caching in Kaohsiung
December 4, 2018 in Taiwan ⋅ ⛅ 25 °C
Today's lunch special was rice dumplings in Zhongpu - peanut, chestnut and radish flavours for mains, and a sticky black rice variety for dessert.

Next stop was the Fo Guang Shan Buddha Museum on the outskirts of Kaohsuing, Taiwan's second biggest city. It had a comprehensive display of Buddha's life and housed one of four Buddha relics in the world (one of his teeth).

Kaohsuing was one of only two Taiwanese cities planned by the Japanese during their occupation, and is a notably different to other cities we have visited, with a functional grid design with wide boulevards, on the banks of a river. Our first stop was a Love River Cruise (the river's name, not the nature of the cruise!).

After grabbing a nearby cache, we were dropped at our hotel, which is in the heart of the city. We walked to the Liouhe Night Market (voted the best night market in Taiwan) and ate the usual range of delicacies - fried squid, Taiwanese hot dog, sweet potato balls and a mango beer.

The walk back to the hotel was via the MRT (Underground) station to view the Dome of Light, the largest glass art installation in the world. It's 30m in diameter and is made of 4,500 glass pieces... and has a resident grand piano player! Not the usual sight in an underground station! Did I mention there is also a cache there... according to the past logs it's notoriously tricky, so we were very happy when Chris made the find 😃Read more
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Taiwan 2018 Darren and Janet
From west to east
December 5, 2018 in Taiwan ⋅ ⛅ 23 °C
Oliver and I went for a quick walk after breakfast, before Steven picked us up at 9am.

We detoured via the Dragon and Tiger Pagodas (in the dragon, out the Tiger!), near the old town wall of Kaohsuing, before heading toward Moon World. It's not a theme park, but is an area of barren hills with a lunar-like landscape in Tianliano District.

After a much welcome ice cream (it was 32 degrees and humid today), we left the east coast and headed across the mountains to the west coast, including a stop for lunch (beef noodle soup today).

The west coast is vastly different, with long beaches and sheer cliffs. The cities are much smaller and have a rural feeling, without the crowds of the west coast.

We arrived in Taitung at 4pm and went for a bike ride around the Forest Reserve, before heading to our hotel (5 star luxury tonight in the Sheraton... it's in the main street and looks very out of place!)

We headed to the outdoor bar for cocktails, then a quick swim before heading out for a walk around town for some tea and a couple of caches.Read more
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Taiwan 2018 Darren and Janet
The bridges of Hualien County
December 6, 2018 in Taiwan ⋅ ⛅ 21 °C
We left Taitung at our regular 9am after a spectacular breakfast at the Sheraton buffet. First stop was the Museum of Prehistory, a very detailed exhibition of Taiwanese history and culture from the beginning of time, which took us close to 2 hours to go through.

We drove most of the day through the pineapple and tea growing area of the East Rift Valley, a widem flat valley between two distinct mountain ranges. The rivers are almost dry at the moment, so they are doing lots of maintenance work in the river beds. We stopped at a lookout on the Luye Plateau, which overlooks the valley on three directions.

Lunch was a Taiwanese bento box in the town of Chuhshang, the rice growing capital of Taiwan, followed by a detour for a short hike to see Nanan Falls. This was followed by a much longer walk in Yushan National Park, a 3km return trip to see a waterfall, which included crossing the pictured suspension bridge.

On the way to Hualien for the night we stopped at the Tropic of Cancer Marker, then Hualien Sugar Mill - a former mill site, but now only a tourist outlet that sells good ice cream!

We arrived at Hualien well after dark, booked into our hotel and headed straight to the night market for tea. They have moved this one off the streets and given it a permanent home in a park, so the lack of having to avoid scooters made it a rather sanitised affair! (it was more like sideshow alley at the royal show than a traditional Taiwanese market, with mostly games of chance and fried food stalls).Read more
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Taiwan 2018 Darren and Janet
Taroko Gorge(ous)
December 7, 2018 in Taiwan ⋅ ☁️ 16 °C
This is the first time in Taiwan that we've spent two nights in the same hotel, so it was a pleasure not to pack bags this morning. Our driver suggested switching the next two days around to avoid the weekend crowds, so today we will do a number of short hikes in Taroko Gorge National Park.

Taroko Gorge, also known as Marble Gorge, is an 18km chasm carved out by the Liwu River. There are multiple walking trails, some along narrow paths high above the river, others in tunnels carved into the rock almost at river level.

We did a few different walks today and covered about 10km in total. On the Swallow Grotto walk we were required to wear hard hats - hopefully the rock falls were going to be small ones!! I'll let the pictures tell the story....Read more
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Taiwan 2018 Darren and Janet
Coast Road to Taipei
December 8, 2018 in Taiwan ⋅ 🌧 16 °C
We began the day visiting Liyu Lake, for a paddle boat ride and visiting a Japanese temple, both on the outskirts of Hualien. Then we began the journey to Taipei.

There's only one road from Hualien to Taipei, and it spectacularly hugs the coast for the first part of the journey, then goes inland through multiple tunnels (the longest being 12.9km), before hitting freeway into the city.

We broke up the journey with a bento-style lunch box, and we arrived in Taipei at 5pm after a long day driving. After farewelling Steven we checked into our hotel and went for a walk in search of tea.Read more
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Taiwan 2018 Darren and Janet
Taipei 101
December 9, 2018 in Taiwan ⋅ 🌧 18 °C
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
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Taiwan 2018 Darren and Janet
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Taipei on foot
December 10, 2018 in Taiwan ⋅ ⛅ 21 °C
Late start and quiet day, we're both feeling a bit under the weather with head colds, so we took a leisurely walk toward Zhongshan Station, one stop up the red line.

We first had to negotiate our way through the "Taipei Main Station Maze". The underground system of Taipei Main Station is so big and so complicated, with complex signs and meaningless exit codes, you could lose your way for hours - and that's how the locals describe it! We fell victim early, walked around for 15 minutes, then took an exit... to find ourselves still on the same side of the street as our hotel 😕

We finally found our way out and meandered to the station via a number of caches, arriving just in time to meet a fellow cacher for lunch - he is a German guy who travels the world caching at every opportunity (he's cached in 33 countries so far). We got in contact with him last night via the app and arranged to meet up... which also counts as a cache since he created an event!

We caught the train back and had a quiet afternoon before heading out for early tea. It's not quite as easy ordering from a street stall without a local to decipher for us. You'll see the result in the photos (It turned out ok... not what I thought we were getting, but ok!)Read more
Traveler Nice
5/22/19Reply
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Taiwan 2018 Darren and Janet
Taipei bikes and gates
December 11, 2018 in Taiwan ⋅ ⛅ 17 °C
We set our sights on a series of caches in the Erchong Floodway today, which contains the longest bike track in Taiwan (20km), as well as 68 sports grounds (we saw 2 baseball fields and multiple basketball courts) . We caught the MRT to Sanchong Station in the hope a bike rental place would be open, despite the drizzling rain, to save us a lot of walking in the unimaginatively named New Taipei Metropolitan Park, aka Erchong Floodway.

As luck would have it, just across the road from the station Fun Bike was open. We rode the park for close to 3 hours, for a total of NTD$112 (AUD$5) and 10 caches. We were the only bikes we saw all day, so not sure if they even covered wages!

We caught the MRT back to our hotel, grabbing a pork, rice, cabbage and tofu bento box for lunch on the way.

Our afternoon walk was to the North Gate of the Taipei City Walls. Taipei was a walled city from 1884 to 1895, at which time the Japanese colonial rulers destroyed it when they redesigned the city. In 1945, when Taiwan was handed back to the Chinese, they rebuilt five of the gates. The North Gate is the only one done in the original design.

We finished the day with an evening walk to the Presidential Palace (you need to book 3 days in advance online to go inside) and 228 Peace Park (in memory of the massacre of Taiwanese citizens after handover), and tea in another shopping strip (spicy pork and spring onion pancake and mango milk).Read more
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Taiwan 2018 Darren and Janet
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Taipei gates and cleavers
December 12, 2018 in Taiwan ⋅ ⛅ 15 °C
Another MRT ride and walk around the Zhongzheng District, home of the Chiang Ki-shek Memorial Hall (dedicated to the former President/dictator of Taiwan... opinion depends who you talk to), the National Library, South Gate, East Gate, and the National Cultural and Creative Gift Centre.

After lunch we wandered to the airport station via the underground maze, and I had a Knife Massage. It wasn't advertised as such that I saw before agreeing (and I'm not sure I'd recommend it) - it looked and felt like I was being attacked by cleavers!

Short flight to Hong Kong, overnight in the airport hotel, ready for a morning flight home.Read more
Traveler This lady looks grumpy and wants to give you a good thumping:)
5/22/19Reply
Traveler I'm sure it was a good experience
5/22/19Reply
Traveler motor bikes are always good photos
5/22/19Reply
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Trip end
December 13, 2018