Tour Of TaiwanNorth To Taipei

It was a 30 minute drive from Yilan to Taipei. This was our only freeway on the east coast, but I mostly kept to the speed limit since most of the drive was in narrow tunnels through the mountains that separate the counties. Even a small accident can block commuter traffic all day. Once you hit those tunnels, you either make it through or you wait. There are no alternate roads at that point.

Since Yilan to Taipei was our least amount of driving, and since this was a road trip, we decided to drive up to Tamsui, which is generally spelled Tamsui, but pronounced 淡水. Most of the place names in Taiwan are spelled relatively close to their pronunciation. Hsinchu and Chiayi might confuse a few foreigners, and it takes English-speaking people a while to get Kaohsiung, not to mention the inappropriate confusion between 高 and 肏, but Tamsui is just off no matter how you look at it. I would have spelled it Danshui, but no one ever asked me when they were printing up English signs and maps.

“Tamsui” is at the mouth of the Tamsui River, about 25km from downtown Taipei. The red line MRT goes that far north, but with almost 20 stops, it takes a while. The drive is pretty easy, once you get away from downtown Taipei traffic.

Like a lot of villages in Taiwan, Tamsui was home to one indigenous group or another who were forced out by invaders. The Spanish invaders built a mission to convert the heathens into the proper religion. The Dutch invaders kicked out the Spanish and built a fort just in case. They were then kicked out by invading Chinese.

Most people go to Tamsui for food, shopping and to stare at the horizon. It is a popular place to watch the sunset because you can face west without anything in front of you but water and sky. One of their signature foods is 阿給, which are liberally soaked cubes of tofu, gutted and filled with fried noodles, wrapped up and steamed. Variations are widely available, but Tamsui seems to be the place to get them.

Just next to Tamui is Yangmingshan National Park, home to Qixing Mountain. Qixing is Taiwan's largest volcano, but the park is a noticeably lower elevation than other mountain parks in the country. Most of the mountain ranges are over 3,000 meters above sea level. Taiwan's tallest mountain, Yushan, is 3952 meters. Qixing is 1120. We drove on roads at Taroko Gorge that were higher.

Like every national park, there are numerous hiking trails. But since this park is based around a volcano, there are flowers and plants that rarely grow in other parts of the country. Millions of people go to Yangmingshan every spring to see the cherry blossoms and early summer for the migrating butterflies. And with volcanoes come hot springs. Finding a hot spring north of Taipei is easier than getting dysentery from gutter oil. Closer to the city, you can sit in a wooden structure built around a spring. At Yangmingshan, you can soak in the mountains.

There are several differences between the hot springs at Yangmingshan and the cold springs at Su'ao. Not only are the temperatures on opposite ends of the scale, so are the dress codes. In the cold springs, we could wear whatever we were willing to get wet. We could have gone in fully clothed if we wanted to. No one would have cared. In the hot springs, not even the bathing suits we brought were allowed. Since they are segregated by gender, no one has a problem with all the nudity.

I fully support separate pools. Segregation almost never works on a date, but when you are there to relax, keeping men away is the way to go. Soaking in water is always better without clothes, even more so the hotter the water gets, and too many people today are not mature enough to be naked without acting like 12-year-old boys. There was a time when it was possible, but just like modern American politics, different parties can no longer work together. Not too long ago, we were all in it together. Now, everyone is the enemy.

I also fully recommend soaking in a natural hot spring on a mountain. Taiwan is a place where it is easy to buy a massage chair. Go to any of the thousands of stores that sell them and you will see several people sitting in chairs and testing them out, getting a free massage. Relaxing is one of Taiwan's national pastimes. A hot spring is a million times more relaxing, in every possible way. And taking off your clothes in the mall and sitting in those chairs is discouraged.

While driving around the park, fully clothed, we hit the northernmost point of Taiwan, Fuguijiao. Just like the southernmost point, Eluanbi, there is a lighthouse up north, though it has a less interesting history and is closed to the public most of the time. Naturally, this had us wondering where the western and eastern tips were. As it turned out, the easternmost point, Sandiaojiao, was an hour's drive away. It would have been more efficient to go to Sandiaojiao from Yilan, but we did not know it existed until we were at Yangmingshan. Unlike Fuguijiao, the lighthouse at Sandiaojiao is a tourist attraction.

The drive to Taipei was mostly downhill, but about as safe as driving down mountain roads can be. Since most people go from Taipei to Sandiaojiao by bus, someone decided that the route should probably not kill everyone. Of course, that also means cars share the road with more than a few buses, so it is not the quickest drive, until you hit the freeway from Keelung to Taipei.

We had no hotel reservations in Taipei, just like the rest of the trip, but Taipei has more than enough hotels. As long as it is not the New Year. Something we had to consider this time was parking. If there are a million hotels in Taipei, there are maybe a hundred with reliable parking. Unlike a B&B in a small village, where you park as if you live in the house, a large city hotel either has a parking lot underground or there is a public lot somewhere in the vicinity. This is where driving a new car has a drawback. In a 20-year-old cream colored Kia, I would be completely comfortable parking anywhere. In a 20-hour-old purple Porsche, I get a little picky about parking spaces.

All the top hotels have parking. They are also $6,000 per night, or more. To make this an authentic road trip, we were looking at places in the $1,000 or less range. Fortunately, Taipei, like most large cities in east Asia, has love hotels.

A love hotel in Taiwan is pretty much like a roadside motel in the United States. They have cheap rooms for low prices. The difference being that love hotels are infinitely cleaner and are designed for couples to go somewhere private. Cheating on your wife is a time-honored tradition in Taiwan. Getting caught is not. Most rooms have bathtubs big enough for two. Some have special sex chairs and mirrors on the ceilings. All have porn on the TV, which is interesting because porn outside of love hotels is as heavily censored in Taiwan as it is in China. Our room was some kind of underwater theme. The ceiling was painted blue with fish and seashells. I'm not sure why anyone would want to have sex under water, but if every room at every love hotel has a theme, they must run out of ideas sooner or later.

Most importantly for us, it had private parking. Each room had its own individual parking garage. They are designed that way so men cheating on their wives can drive their mistress to the motel and go into their room without being seen by anyone. Lily and I were never worried about being seen, but the private garage was about the safest place I could possibly park my new car. I found that convenient.

We stayed in Xinyi, which was my first neighborhood on my first trip to Taipei. This trip was about exploring new places, but it was nice to see something familiar. That made Taipei less hectic and busy, which was nice.

Xinyi is the government center of Taipei, with the city hall, Taipei 101, world trade center, and the convention center. If you want to get to know Taipei or its people, this is not the best neighborhood, but because it is full of government buildings and overpriced western hotels, there are wide sidewalks where you can ride a bicycle without getting hit by cars. Other than along the rivers, Xinyi might be the safest place to ride a bicycle in Taipei.

I have spent more time in Taipei than anywhere else in Taiwan, besides Kaohsiung, but I have no idea what Taipei's most famous food is. In villages and smaller townships, everyone will tell you their signature dish. Taipei might be too large to have one.