Asia’s Sparkling Gem
Taiwan fits a surprising variety of experiences into its compact size
Experience Taiwan’s tea plantations and historical temples.
With a toot of its horn and a metallic screech, the Alishan Forest Railway rumbles out of Chiayi, a mid-sized city in south-western Taiwan. The humid jumble of roaring motorcycles and bubble tea shops makes way for betel nut plantations and clotheslines in small-town backyards that straddle railroad tracks first built for loggers.
The train, a popular attraction that brings travellers up and down the mountains, sputters through rice paddies and citrus orchards so close I can almost reach out and nab the fruit from my window. Bamboo and sugar palms tickle the sides of the train. As we coil higher towards the peak, around Z-shaped bends and through mossy tunnels, the views fade behind a veil of cold fog held up by ancient red cypress trees whose cobra-size roots cover the ground like noodle soup.
My journey to the mountain resort of Alishan is a two-hour slideshow of kaleidoscopic green that sums up the diversity of Taiwan. At just under 400 kilometres from north to south, this is a land where a traveller can go from tropical coast, through soaring mountains, to dense woodlands in under two hours – part of the appeal of exploring this eggplant-shaped nation.
Alishan is one of my favourite stops on a road trip through the country, beginning in the capital, Taipei, in the north; continuing through some of the nine national parks full of hot springs, waterfalls, gorges and evergreen tropical rainforest; over cloud-shrouded mountaintops; and on to the crystalline beaches of the far south. Taiwan has been close to my heart since I first came, in 2012, wide-eyed on an eight-month gap-year jaunt around Asia. My guide was a girl named Etty, whom I’d first contacted via Couchsurf ing and met for coffee in Bangkok to share travel tips (she was planning to visit my home country of the Netherlands). We happened to be in Taiwan at the same time, and I
ended up meeting her parents in the country’s second city of Taichung – a town of skyscrapers and steaming, neon-glowing night markets.
We were soon planning t rips through Japan, Cambodia and Sri Lanka, while it dawned on us that this was more than a holiday fling. We moved back to Bangkok and are now married with a one year old who has a Taiwanese middle name and a Dutch last name.
VISITING TAICHUNG two or three times a year, I’ve come to see it through my wife’s eyes – as a home of sorts, a place for crammed dinner tables and toasts with kaoliang, sorghum liquor, to Popo, Etty’s late grandmother. Over Auntie Chao’s beef noodle soup, my father-in-law sometimes gets misty-eyed talking about the sunrise over Yushan, Taiwan’s highest peak, or the volcanic landscapes, cherry blossoms, and bubbling waterfalls of the Yangmingshan National Park, on Taipei’s northern fringe.
A retired forestry official, my father-in-law helped found some of the country’s national parks and was posted to many of its wilder corners. He reminds us that 60 per cent of the country is covered in forest, and that it was for good reason that Portuguese sailors christened it Ilha For
mosa, or Beautiful Island, when they washed up here in the 16th century.
Taiwan was partly ruled by the Dutch and the Spanish in the 17th century, then held completely by the mainland Chinese until it was invaded
by the Japanese in 1895. The new rulers built railroads, tunnels and factories, turning Taiwan into a supplier for Japan’s booming industry until they were ousted after World War II.
Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese Nationalist leader who fled the newly Communist mainland in 1949 to set up a stronghold in Taiwan, envisioned a Confucian society with respect for the past, along with a Western-friendly form of capitalism. Even as the country emerged as one of the four Asian Tigers, the genteel culture he nurtured has endured.
I FEEL THE JAPANESE INFLUENCE at Jiufen, one of my first stops, a seaside town in the lush mountains east of Taipei. Its teahouses on the hillsides and lantern-lined alleyways were mostly built by Japanese gold seekers in the late 19th century. Today, the majority of visitors are still Japanese, though they largely come because Jiufen is said to be one of the inspirations for the setting of the Japanese animated movie Spirited Away.
We hike upwards through grassy plains to a stack of colossal boulders on top of Teapot Mountain as our softly spoken Taiwanese guide, Steven Chang, talks of mô-sîn-á, the folk creatures believed to cause hikers to lose their way. From the summit I see a lone octagonal pavilion on a distant jagged mountaintop. In the valley behind me are the crumbling remnants of a Japanese Shinto shrine; beyond, the deep-blue nothingness of the East China Sea.
Wherever you are in Taiwan, temples are never far. Their crowns jut from suburban neighbourhoods and far-flung forests, topped with multicoloured dragons, phoenixes and intricate scenes dancing from one gabled roof to another. Every feather, every scaled claw, every whisker is painstakingly created from smashed-up plates and tiles, a traditional Chinese craft that has withered on the mainland in tandem with religion. In Taiwan, Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity and curious folk customs have flourished together.
We drive to Shitoushan, 90 minutes southwest of Taipei, passing verdant rice paddies
and one- street townships where women in tartan bucket hats hawk plump pomelos (a large citrus fruit) and football-size cabbages. Our lodgings this night is the Taoist Quanhua Temple, a sprawling mess of staircases, pagodas and ceramic cranes built into a sandstone cliff face. I step onto my balcony to find the sky a shade of gold, the air sweetly fragrant from smouldering joss sticks. The valley echoes with chirping crickets and the mumbling of prayer, interrupted only by the occasional clang of a gong.
Somewhere in the distance I hear a wail. Leaving the temple to trace its source, I discover a little shrine half-embedded in a cave. A woman wearing a pink tracksuit is crying in front of the altar. A short man with salt-and-pepper hair joins me and explains that the woman is hearing otherworldly voices. “It’s the language of gods,” he concludes, as the woman does ballerina-like jumps of ecstasy. “She has the gift.”
That night I am in bed by eight, lines of prayer still droning from monastery speakers.
SOUTH OF SHITOUSHAN, the Central Cross Island Highway connects Taiwan’s populous west with the wild east, through the peaks and gorges of the Taroko National Park, eventually arriving at the Qingshui Cliff – 20 kilometres of forested bluffs that plunge almost vertically into the Pacific Ocean. We stop at the Tunnel of Nine Turns viewpoint, where Korean, Thai and Japanese voices mingle with the hypnotic gurgle of waterfalls
feeding into the gorge. Swallows sweep in and out of cliffs that are like layered cakes of swirling marble. Below me the Liwu River rages around mammoth boulders.
Deeper inland, it is just us and the road, silent black tunnels opening into muffled bamboo forests or curious villages smothered in moss. Mr Wang, the driver for this section of the trip, occasionally breaks the silence to talk about Formosan black bear encounters, boar-hunting trips and ambushes by wild macaques.
One story is halted by the sound of a gunshot in the distance. “Mountain rats,” he mumbles, of the poachers who kill wild boar and muntjac, a type of deer. “But nothing compares to the head-hunting tribes who once roamed these forests.”
Beer cans, cigarettes and areca nuts wrapped in betel leaves are laid on crumbling roadside walls, folksy cries for good fortune.
As we rise and the pressure increases on our eardrums, needles replace tropical foliage. Conifer- covered peaks huddle like giants with hairy backs. The road finally reaches Sun Moon Lake. We pull into a nondescript restaurant to eat beef noodles. From the kitchen comes the chack-a-chack of a ladle hitting a fiery wok; behind us, a lady sells ‘frog eggs drink’ – kumquat lemonade laced with basil seeds. I spend the better part of the afternoon lolling around the lakeshore, watching bushy-tailed squirrels steal papaya from vendors, and listening to a lone violin player scratching out Chinese folk tunes.
SOUTH OF THE LAKE we stop to visit one of the region’s tea plantations, which grows oolong and is prized like Champagne. Between two of thousands of neat lines of shrubs, we meet a troupe of tea pluckers in traditional hats draped with colourful Hello Kitty-emblazoned cloths. A man in his 50s with a tar-black betel nut smile waves us closer, showing me a razor blade taped to his gloved index finger. “We harvest all our tea by hand,” he tells me. “None of that machine stuff. Only the freshest leaves, the highest quality.”