Taipei On a Train

Not that long ago, getting from the airport into the city required either several connections or one long bus or taxi ride. Like a lot of large Asian cities, the airport is nowhere near the city.

Taoyuan International Airport recently underwent some major renovations. Most of it looks cosmetic, as far as I can tell, but one big difference is that now you can take a train directly from the airport into the city. When they built the high speed train line, it never touched the airport, for some reason. To get from one to the other, you had to take a slow and not especially clean shuttle bus. They filled up pretty fast, and waiting for the second or third bus in the rain was never pleasant. There was always the regular bus that went from the airport into the city, but that was always slow and not especially clean.

Some time between my last trip and this one, they connected the airport to the high speed train. That means you can take a single train, with no shuttles, into the city. Since the high speed train system is only about ten years old, I don't see why they did not do this right from the beginning. There is probably a convoluted political answer.

Ironically, there was a smaller airport right across the river from our hotel. Unfortunately, there are no direct flights from Hong Kong.

Once you are in the city, Taipei's MRT system is pretty much like Hong Kong's MTR or Tokyo Metro. Taipei has fewer lines in a smaller space, making it pretty simple to navigate. Hong Kong and Tokyo always made it easy to get into the city from the airport.

Something I have always wanted to do is take a train across the United States. Right now, I don't have the time, and I don't live conveniently close. I would also like to take a bullet train across Japan. That takes less time. Those trains are fast, and Japan is considerably smaller. As it turns out, a Japanese company made the high speed trains that run the length of Taiwan. Taiwan was also nice enough to make itself much smaller than Japan or the United States. The length of Taiwan is about the same distance as New York to Washington, DC. You can take the high speed train from one end of the country to the other in less than two hours.

From Taipei, the other end is Kaohsiung. I don't know anything about Kaohsiung, but a few people have told me I should go there. It has the largest natural harbor in the country, apparently. And lots of shopping. When you live in Hong Kong, people always tell you about other cities with shopping. I don't get it. That is almost like living in Chicago and people telling you about pizza in Indiana.

Lily and I took the high speed train from Taipei to Kaohsiung. Not to go to Kaohsiung, and certainly not to go shopping. We wanted to ride the train. The cars have wide windows, so you get a good view of the scenery. Unfortunately, we did not get much scenery. Taipei had blaring sunlight. Taichung, in the middle of the country, was cloudy and had obviously rained before we got there. South of Taichung, we sped headlong into a storm. The scenery for half the trip was dark and wet.

The end of the line was Kaohsiung, which has its own MRT system to get from the station to more interesting parts of the city. But it was raining heavily and we knew nothing about Kaohsiung. I'm all for exploring new places, but we could do that in Taipei without a cloud in the sky. After lunch at the shopping mall connected to the station, we went back. This time, we left the gloom and rode into the light.