A piercing sound reverberates around the crowded bus as it lurches along the winding mountain roads of central Taiwan. Jolted from their mid-afternoon reverie, the weary hikers peer down as one at the message on their phones. Headlined“ Missile flyover Taiwan airspace, be aware.”
On our two-week round tour of the island we stay in six places, arriving in Taipei just after Christmas and leaving just before the January 13 election. Making full use of the country’s efficient rail network, we travel south down the more sparsely populated east coast, across to the port city of Kaohsiung, north to the historical capital of Tainan and into the central mountains of Alishan before taking the high-speed rail back to Taipei.
Eternal Spring Shrine in Taroko National Park commemorates the hundreds who died building a highway in the 1950s.Hualien is a perfect base to explore Taroko National Park, the main east-coast drawcard and an easy 40-minute bus ride away. The prize attraction, Toroko Gorge, is stunning – a deep, narrow, winding, canyon 19 kilometres long, carved out of the steep marble mountains by the Liwu River.
On the waterfront at the southern port of Kaohsiung, the Labourer and the Fisherwoman mark the entrance of the Pier-2 Art District.Taiwan is the land of more than 15,000 temples and nowhere is this more evident than in the historical capital of Tainan, where an elaborately decorated Buddhist or Taoist temple can be found around almost every corner.
Our final destination: the mountains of central Taiwan. In the Alishan National Forest Recreation Area, boardwalks and trails lead through majestic alpine cloud forests and past 1000-year-old cypress trees.