Taiwan impressions

There were a whole host of fascinating little things that we have experienced throughout our time in Taiwan. Number one has to be the pedestrian traffic lights, which are unique in our experience. The little green man has a hat and is animated (walking) when you can cross. The last 10 seconds of the allowed time see him speeding up to a jog. It's very amusing, although with some of the very wide streets, careful judgement is called for when you see him on the move. 

Rubbish collection is a complex issue, especially in the little laneways throughout the cities (and towns). It turns out that they have rubbish trucks that play tunes, like ice cream vans in Australia. And yes, including Greensleeves. This is the signal to bring out your rubbish to the truck, and it is still hard to get used to - especially if you're at street level when the Pavlovian reaction to the music is not matched by the wafting smell accompanying the truck. 

An amusing part of the stay came from our tendency to be prepared to walk in to any place we deem "interesting". Google translate is a wonder, but it was fun to watch the panic play out across people's faces as we walked into some of the less touristy venues. This was universally followed by someone running off to drag the best English speaker in the store/restaurant away from whatever they were doing to come and serve us. For all that, everyone was extremely accommodating of our almost complete lack of any Chinese language skills, and we always managed to make ourselves understood - and even have a few google-mediated conversations along the way. 

Taiwan is a place of street markets and night markets, with a staggering variety of foods available. At every single night markets we went to (and there were a lot!), we found new dishes that we hadn't seen before. We tasted a glorious number of new dishes, with highlights including stuffed chicken wings, scallion pancakes (with various fillings), and the traditional Thao food we found at Sun Moon Lake. 

Each of the cities we visited were quite different from each other - Taipei has a combination of history and busyness you'd expect from the capital, Tainan felt more historical (befitting the old capital, Taichung was not really touristy at all, and Kaohsiung felt the most modern of all. For all that, it was when we moved out of the cities into the less inhabited areas that provided the most amazing experiences. Getting up into the hills was just glorious with lush greenery and less crowds. The chance to walk along wooded paths and stone steps to have another new view open up in front of us, kept reminding us why we love traveling and exploring so much. 

All-in-all Taiwan proved to be a really interesting and fun experience, and we would be happy to recommend a visit to anyone.   

Tainan and Kaohsiung

Tainan is the old capital of Taiwan, and was a last minute addition to our itinerary as we decided that it was a better prospect than returning to Taichung after leaving the mountains. Of course, the weather was much better on our last day in Sun Moon Lake, and we were able to take a walk around the lakeshore and take a cable car ride that turned out to be a lot longer than expected - this resulted in us missing the intended bus by 10 minutes and then being delayed by another hour... We also resolved that we would stop drinking, at least for a few days - not that we had been having a lot, but we wanted to avoid the habit of "one or two" every night. 

The end result was that by the time we got to Tainan and settled in to the hotel, it was about time to go in search of dinner. We had been told that Tainan had the "most authentic" Taiwanese street food and went to the biggest night market - Dadong markets - in search of some. This turned out to be a major disappointment, probably due to the fact we were there on a Monday night. There were very few stalls, with nothing much that appealed to us, so we decided to walk the 2km back to the hotel and look for somewhere to eat along the way. James' need to move in the shortest possible straight line took us into some dark, deserted back streets, causing Gillian a few anxious moments. In the dingiest looking part of the walk, she spotted a sign for a bar, that on closer inspection turned out to be quite a fancy cocktail bar. New resolutions were tossed aside, as the finding of a back-alley hipster bar in the middle of the old capital of Taiwan just couldn't be ignored. There was a fun array of unique cocktails on offer, Gillian had one called a "doner kebab" (it tasted like meat, and was better than you'd think), and James had one with fermented bee pollen. There were a couple more as well, but at least they also had some food to offset the drinks, and make up for the earlier failure. It was the sort of find that we hope for as we randomly wander the streets of any new place. If you ever find yourself in Tainan, look up Bar Alter - it was really great.

The next day we did some wandering through the city, visiting a Confucian temple, which proved to be extremely interesting. There is a strong academic theme to the worship of Confucius, which James could appreciate. There was a lot of information in English explaining everything, that was very enlightening, with some interactive displays that kept us amused. We moved on to visit the Hayashi department store, a cute building on Gillian's wish list, which still shows signs of damage from American air raids in WWII. We wandered through some more market areas, to Shennong street - the oldest street in Tainan, although most of the stores/stalls were closed for the day. We did find some relief from the heat in a tucked away tea store, and walked from there to some of the major temples in Tainan, including the Sacrificial Rites Martial Temple - which is a large complex and pretty famous throughout Taiwan (and well attended).

Kaohsiung was our final destination in Taiwan, and included treating ourselves to a moderately fancy hotel. The city is different again to the others we visited, feeling a lot more modern. This is probably due to a lot of recent development as a result of the expansion of the port activities, which were really kicked off during the Japanese occupation, meaning it is a relatively young city, overall (thanks Kaohsiung History Museum!). There were again a lot of interesting options for food, and we went through the gamut, with a western style coffee shop (with remarkable latte art!), night markets (the best of the trip for food), a street corner restaurant lunch which provided remarkable taste and value, and having a final dinner of dumplings in the hotel restaurant - which were really excellent. 

Along the way we explored the port area, had fun wandering the city and also went to the lotus lake and Old Fongshan City area, learning a reasonable amount about the history of the city as a Dutch outpost, then development of irrigation and the port area during the Japanese era, becoming the most significant port in Taiwan in the modern day. After scratching the surface, we found it's an interesting place to visit in its own right, with a fair bit of its own history and charm.

Taichung and Sun Moon Lake - Wet, wet, wet

Well, it had to happen, with wet weather setting in as we moved from Taipei to Taichung. After dropping our bags at the hotel, we took off to see what Taichung had to offer, with an eye on the sky as there were periodic torrential downpours throughout the day. First stop was the Miyahara ice cream/dessert shop, which provided us with a nourishing lunch. 

After that we were off exploring, which involved wandering through some markets, and along the Taichung river walk, stopping along the way at the cartoon character alley. We were lucky that the rain stayed away until we were under cover, at which point a huge dump of rain saw us scurrying into a tiny little backstreet market, complete with its own Buddhist temple(shrine?). It was fascinating to see, and has been a feature of the various markets we have visited so far. 

An afternoon of wandering in sticky heat found us heading back to the hotel, with the impression that there was not really a lot for tourists to see in the city. We decided to find a local place for dinner, which well and truly made up for our disappointment to that point. We have been trying not to make this all about food, but the restaurant we tried ticked all the boxes for our ambitions in taking this sort of trip. We walked in with no one there that spoke English, armed with google translate. On the way to our table, we saw a fantastic looking fish dish on one of the occupied tables, and with educated guesswork we were able to order it ("pepper fish" was the google translation). It was fantastic and fitted our aspirations to the rewards that can come from diving in to an unknown situation. 

 

After Taichung, it was on to Sun Moon Lake, a popular tourist destination up in the mountains - with locals as well as international visitors. We got off the bus at the tourist centre which was the last stop, and after arming oursleves with the information we needed for our visit decided the virtuous thing would be to walk the 3km along the lakeside path to catch the local bus to our accommodation. By the time we got there, the rain had set in properly and we were pretty wet on arrival at our bed and breakfast. After settling ourselves in, we went for a wander around the (what else) street food market of the local village, Ita Thao. Happily, it provided us with a whole new range of treats we hadn't yet tried, including steamed rice and millet wrapped in chicken skin and deep fried. Awesome!

Waking up the next day, it was clear that our plans for a cycle around the lake would have to be revised, with torrential rain in the morning. A total reliance on public transport and shank's pony meant that James was particularly reluctant to get outside, but by midday the rain had slowed down to a drizzle and we headed out for an explore. It became clear that the weather had given us only a temporary reprieve, but once in motion we decided to get on the ferry and head across the lake to one of the other towns. Umbrellas from the B&B were invaluable. With a touch of irony, we stopped at a local cafe with a view to escape the rain and have some lunch - it turned out to be ordinary, at best. A disappointing plate of fried treats that looked like a kids meal at a country pub in Australia. Undeterred, we went for a wet wander, exploring the local area before heading back to the ferry to visit one of the local temples on the other side of the lake. By this stage, the weather had come back with a vengeance and all views were severely curtailed, although we had hints from the previous day of what it could look like. We decided against the 1km walk up to the top of the peninsula to see the big pagoda (allegedly, we couldn't see it through the clouds!), and ended up back on the ferry towards our own home for the night. 

By the evening, the rain had finally stopped and we headed to a little restaurant that we had spotted the previous day, which had an indigenous menu - from the local Thau people. Talk about fantastic! It was a properly fancy meal (complete with dry ice decoration), and featured wild boar and a local fish soup. Once finished, we were tempted to order the whole thing over again. It certainly helped make up for the rain-shortened tourism for the day. Back at the B&B, a couple of drinks from the local convenience store finished off the day.

       

Taipei history and culture

We have visited a range of the cultural institutions in Taipei, which have provided their own interesting perspective on Taiwan and its place in the world. The first was the Chiang Kai-shek memorial, a truly impressive complex with massive buildings in a huge park in the centre of the city. Of course, this includes a larger than life statue of the man himself, at the top of a huge building (more stairs!). The scale of it was pretty awe-inspiring, prompting attempts to take pictures to make sense of the scale. It's not clear that worked so well. 

The building has been turned into a democracy museum, which is interesting given Chiang Kai-shek's rule over China, and then Taiwan, lasted for 47 years without an election. Not to mention the relatively recent nature of Taiwan's democracy at all. Despite the revisionist tendencies, there is still a somewhat realistic overview of the rule of the Kuomintang in Taiwan, along with stories of the Japanese occupation. There is a lot of memorabilia in there, as well as an impressive array of original documents. Not to mention every award presented to CKS from countries across the world - there's a serious array of medals!

Further out of town is the National Palace Museum, featuring a collection of museum treasures from the Song dynasty palaces (the last emperors before the revolutions in China). We arrived after lunch, with only about 2 hours to have a look around, which might have been a bit of a mistake. We could easily have spent the whole day there. As it was, we focused on the exhibits that we most wanted to see, with incredible collections of artifacts dating back to the Stone Age, and moving all the way through to the start of the 1900s. The collection includes a fantastic display of pottery that goes through the ages, with magnificent Ming dynasty pieces and explanations of how the development and production was overseen by the Chinese rulers. There were collections of imperial furniture, jewelry and an array of weapons, again charting the development from the Stone Age right through to more modern times. It was an incredible place to visit.

Naturally, once we found out the Presidential Office building was just around the corner and had tours that don't require booking, that was also on the list. It was again interesting to see a Taiwanese perspective (story?) being presented about their place in the world and their role as a bastion of democracy. It's clear enough why that would be important at this point in time in particular, and probably ties in with all the directions to air raid shelters that appear throughout Taipei. The tour was interesting, charting the development of Taiwan's government and civil society. It included a section on indigenous rights - a succession of Dutch, Japanese and Chinese colonisations displaced the original inhabitants who have their own culture and languages. They make up 2% or so of the population today, and the situation has strong parallels with Australia. This is a topic for some future research... Taiwan was also the first Asian country to legalise same-sex marriage, not so long after Australia finally managed it.

In addition to these institutions, we visited a range of temples, which have quite a different feel to those we encountered in Mongolia. Our guess is that this is partly due to the practice of a different strain of Buddhism, but also due to the lack of destruction that comes with the absence of a Communist history. Many temples are located in the middle of night markets, big and small. The most impressive we saw was the Lungshan Temple, one of the most significant in the country. It has an array of beautiful buildings, decorations and statues, and is clearly much more than a tourist attraction, with a wide range of people there to worship. Trying to be respectful while attempting to keep our jaws off the floor and taking some pictures remains a constant challenge. 

Taipei and surrounds exploration

After boarding another new airline (t'way) we found ourselves in Taipei and ready to start exploring Taiwan.

We stepped off the plane and were greeted with a very warm and humid afternoon, although we decided it was more comfortable than the 38 degrees in Seoul the previous day. James managed to navigate the subway system and we arrived at our hotel, stashed our bags and headed out on our first foray into the streets of Taipei, keen to get our first taste of anything. As far as we can tell, Taipei is a collection of "old streets" and night markets. Our first stop was Dihua Street, the city's biggest and oldest "old street", with a new world of things to look at and smell. Light meals in the lead up to the afternoon meant it was a tantalising prospect. We explored a selected few shops, mainly featuring teapots and tea, lamenting all the while that we could not buy anything as our compact luggage left no room to carry anything else. The amount of dried mushrooms on this street was just amazing - how many mushroom shops can be sustained in such a small area anyway? And no we didn't stop to sample anything but a few jokes were made. 

Each old street seems to have it's own atmosphere and specialties, and they have been fun to explore, whether intentional or coming across them by accident. They have included restored historic areas, like the Bopiliao Historical Block, restored to give a sense of how things were in previous times, as well as more mundane areas with a wide range of shops, usually centred around particular themes. It's the sort of arrangement that acts like catnip for us, providing endless opportunity to play "what's around the corner?" - the answer is almost always interesting.    

Our explorations included stumbling on the river and the Dadocheng Wharf Container Market, were we stopped to enjoy the amazing view and to partake of a well deserved cold beverage. We watched the fish jumping and the instagrammers, yet again, try to get that perfect shot. As Gillian enjoys people watching and making up back stories this provided a certain amount of entertainment. Wandering off in search of our first night market to sample the local street foods, we encountered a couple of impromptu outdoor karaoke groups, but much as Gillian tried to encourage James to stop and join in the festivities he could just not be persuaded. Despite the theory of "when in Taipei"...

The night markets are lively places with a wide variety of tempting (and otherwise) street foods. Ximending night market provided pork pepper buns, stinky tofu (actually pretty tasty once you get bast the "distinctive" smell!) and radish cakes. We were well and truly sold on the concept, despite at least one burnt mouth from over enthusiasm. Shilin night markets were different again, located around a large Buddhist temple and including a massive "sideshow alley" arrangement, with a whole new range of food including our first dumplings (not our last), duck pancakes and peanut brittle ice creams. Clearly the objective was to sample as big a variety of the local cuisine as possible. Which is only reasonable give the foodie reputation of Taiwan. 

Our stay in Taipei included a day trip up into the hills via the Pingxi railway, originally built by the Japanese as a mining railway. Today it is a big tourist attraction for locals and foreigners alike. The most popular stopping point is Shifen, with its own old street (and the most awesome stuffed chicken wings!), and the widest waterfall in Taiwan - "Taiwan's Niagara" as it was described by one sign. This was something of an oversell, but it was very pretty and the walk along the river is very scenic. The area is famous for sending up sky lanterns at festivals twice a year, and tourists buys lanterns to send off when they get up there. It turns out this is not a great environmental practice, as the walk along the river is littered with spent sky lanterns, on the riverbanks, in the water and stuck up trees. Needless to say we didn't partake. 

The other striking feature of the town is the railway line going right down the street with no barriers. People are shooed off the tracks as each train approaches, and crowd the edge of the line taking photos. It's nervewracking to watch!

We also headed up to Pingxi, further along the line, which was a lot quieter. There is a short hiking loop that we had decided to try, which takes in a couple of the local mountain peaks. This turned out to be a little more than we had bargained for, with very steep steps (at least as many as in Seoul), followed by some rope assisted ascending at the end to get to the top. Climbs go along razor edged rock ridges, providing a serious intimidation factor. After climbing the first peak (Mt Xiaozi), discretion overrode valour and we headed back down the hill to catch the train home. It was interesting to see the couple of Buddha shrines on the way down to town, presumably where you give thanks for not falling off the edge of the climbs!

Seoul revisited

Another couple of days in Seoul proved pretty hot, with temperatures getting up over 37 degrees, and humidity very high. This limited what we were able to do, to a certain extent, although we got moving early on our first day to do a walk along a section of the old city wall. There is an 18+km path that follows the entire wall boundary, our intention was to do somewhat less that that, with a little loop from where we were staying into the city centre. It all started off well enough, at the Gwanhuimun gate, but after relatively easy navigation, James took a wrong turn and we ended up walking in circles on a walking path near Seoul forest. Few visual landmarks meant it took some time to find the way out of the maze and there were a fair few steps added to our count. once back on the path we headed up towards Seoul tower, with a lot of stairs as the wall climbed the hill. Helpfully, someone had kept a count in chalk on the staircase, and we topped out at 662 stairs climbed. Brutal.

The views from Seoul tower (almost) made up for it, and allowed us to see a side of the city we hadn't previously experienced. If it wasn't pushing into the mid-30s and higher, it would have been a really nice way to spend the day. 

Lunch was at Namdaemun markets where we ducked down an interesting looking alley called "Hairtail alley", where it looked like there were some little restaurants (do you call them restaurants if they seat about 10 people max?). Turns out that "hairtail" is a kind of fish, also called cutlassfish. The little place we ducked into was run by a couple of Korean old women who told us what to order and then served it up. It was super tasty, although we had to figure out the trick of separating the flesh from the bones, which were numerous.

After that, it was back to our airbnb for some cool and rest for the rest of the afternoon. Dinner was at a local street food market - Gwangjang - that Gillian had come across on a Netflix food doco, and she was thrilled to be able to get a seat at the stall of a woman famous for her mandu dumplings and handcut noodles. Naturally, we tried both...

It was blazing hot again for our final day in Seoul, which was slated for catching up with long time friends Hyuck and Namsu. There was not so much "doing" in this case - more a lot of time talking. Which was great and the way it should be really. We spread our time around tea shops and a very popular restaurant in Seoul that seemed to have nearly as much seating outside for people waiting as it did inside for people eating. The food was great and worth the (short, in our case) wait. A stroll back along the Cheonggyecheon stream kept the temperature down about 5 degrees lower than everywhere else, and we spent the rest of the day relaxing and packing (for the move on to Taiwan), only emerging to get ice creams from the little conbini below our apartment for dinner, given that we were still full from lunch!

 
 

Ulaanbatur and Mongolia wrap up

Ulaanbatur is an interesting city to visit, it is clearly still developing, with a lot of construction going on all over the place. Things are complicated by the fact that there is a construction season, thanks to the extreme winters with temperatures getting down to -40 degrees. The place we stayed had distinct post-communist vibes, reminding us a lot of accommodation we struck in Serbia in Novi Sad and Belgrade (for old time's sake - https://travelsalongthedanube.blogspot.com/2019/08/firstly-gillian-would-like-to-thank.html). Thankfully, no Soviet era lift to travel in, although carrying the backpack up 3 flights of stairs wasn't totally optimal. 

There are a bunch of interesting places to visit and see, in addition to the temples, we went to the Chinggis Khan Museum and the National Museum of Mongolia, both of which were excellent and provided a really nice picture of the role that Mongolia has played in world history across the ages. We still find it strange that essentially none of this is taught in history classes at school - there are real blind spots in Western education regarding Asian history. Although the same thoughts occurred to us after riding through Eastern Europe too, so the blind spots are widely spread around... The highlight of the institutions, though, was the National Art Gallery, which had a fantastic collection of Mongolian Art, most of it from the last 100 years or so. Really well worth visiting and took us a bit by surprise. Both of us had pieces we were struck by and spent quite some time staring at. 

The centre of the city has a huge square, dominated by the National Parliament Building on the northern side. Gillian, of course, was very excited to see it, and also disappointed that there were no tours. The square also functions as a social space late into the night, with families visiting, and kids (and bigger kids) riding around all over the place on a variety of electric and non-electric vehicles. The cityscape itself is clearly evolving, and it was fun to walk around and see the contrast between some of the newer and older areas. We were left with a clear sense that in 10 years time the city will look and feel very different. 

In addition to everything else, Ulaanbatur was our opportunity to properly sample a variety of traditional Mongolian dishes. As previously mentioned, food on the tour at the ger camps was definitely geared towards Western tourist tastes, which left us with only a few chances for sampling Mongolian food. We tried to make up for it back in Ulaanbatur, although we cracked slightly on the final night - see if you can spot the imposter...