So easy!
We went in the beginning of April, and it was hot and humid. Luckily, our fantastic tour guide, Manu, organized the tour such that activities in the sun were about 1 hour stints, alternating with an AC break on the bus, or in a cafe or shop, before going back outside in the heat. We got to see so much of the island, yet the trip felt “relaxed”. And boy did we eat well on this trip! I’m sure I gained at least 10 pounds! Here are the highlights from our trip, going around the island clockwise.
Taipei to Jiaoxi
We only spent the first night and last night of the trip in Taipei, but luckily my friend Erick from my Exelixis days, had time to come out to meet us at the Okura Prestige (our hotel). We had a good time catching up and enjoyed some ice cream at the nearby Cremia.
Do we look the same as from 20+ years ago? Ha ha
The next morning we went to the National Palace Museum. It houses 600,000 pieces of art from China’s forbidden city. Then we ate soup dumplings at Din Tai Fung, and did some photo stops in Taipei before driving over to Jiaoxi.
National Palace Museum
National Palace Museum: The famous meat stone, a piece of jade carved to look like a piece of fatty pork, really cracked me up!
National Palace Museum: Jadeite cabbage is so life-like! It’s amazing how the creator used the natural jade color to his advantage. Who knew that the humble cabbage was a symbol of purity?
Liberty Square (formerly Chiang Kai-Shek memorial hall) at night
Liberty Square during the day
After the photo stops and learning some history about Taiwan’s government, the bus drove us to the town of Jiaoxi, where we would spend the night. The highlight were the spas at the resort. The spas in Taiwan thankfully always gave the choice to either be in a bathing suit, co-ed, or Japanese onsen style (naked, unisex). Another difference between Japan and Taiwan spas is that the ones in Taiwan required a shower cap, so we had to buy one at the spa.
Evergreen Resort hotel spa had various pools of different temperatures, jets shooting water from above and the side, as well as steam rooms and dry saunas. But what I liked the most was a pool with fish that nibble at your feet. 😅 How uniquely special (and ticklish)! FYI, this is not my foot…
Food for the day:
The traditional breakfast of savory soy milk with Chinese donuts at the Okura Prestige was interesting. It comes with a whole set of instructions. Ha ha
How to make the savory soy milk
Lunch at Din Tai Fung Taipei
Each dumpling has a perfect 18 folds that puts the Valley Fair Din Tai Fung here in the states to shame…
The DinTai Fung in Taipei has so many more dumpling flavors than in the states—even dessert dumplings!!! And the skin is way better, that even those with not the best chopsticks skills wouldn’t puncture the bao. Not a single drop of soup was lost to the steamer basket. Heh heh. We got to try the original pork, crab, truffle, zucchini, taro and chocolate. My favorites are the original pork, truffle, and taro.
And it has adorable pens, pins and mugs for purchase. I’ve never seen these at any of the DinTai Fung’s in California or Seattle.
Buffet dinner at the Evergreen Resort Hotel in Jiaoxi. Yes, I pretty much just had two plates of sushi and ignored everything else. Well, except dessert. Must have dessert! Ha ha
Buffet dinner at the Evergreen Resort Hotel in Jiaoxi
Xincheng Township (Hualien) to Ruisui
Due to the recent 7.2 magnitude earthquake on the eastern side of Taiwan (Hualien), we didn’t get to visit Taroko National Park. It was the strongest quake to hit Taiwan in 25 years. The earthquake damaged the roads to Hualien, so we had to take a train from Jiaoxi to Xincheng. The company had chartered two buses; one drove around the island counterclockwise from Taipei (13 hour drive!) with our luggage, while another one drove us to Jiaoxi so we could relax at the spa, spend the night, then take a train for 1.5 hours to meet back up with the original bus the next day. Now that’s creative pivoting! If I had planned the trip myself and a major earthquake had struck days before, I might have decided not to visit eastern Taiwan all together. But luckily, we were with a tour group, so we still got to experience the eastern side of Taiwan.
Here are the day’s highlights in pictures.
Hunting for jade at Seven Stars beach (also known as lazy fisherman’s beach because there is a deep trench off the coast of this beach such that fishermen can set up nets with a funnel opening where the fish will swim right in and can’t get out). The tour guide told us that he found several pieces of jade at Taroko National park after a monsoon, so Jade is prevalent around the area. The way to tell if it’s jade, hold it to light and if it’s translucent, it’s jade. Well, let’s just say, I won’t quit my day job…
After lunch, we went to Matai’an Wetlands where we dressed up in Amis tribe (one of the Taiwanese aboriginal tribes) clothing, learned about their matriarchal culture (the men take on the wife’s family name after marriage!), and participated in an Amis dance.
Here the Amis guide demonstrates how the hollow tube, reeds, and plant ecosystem they build enable farming for eel, shrimp and fish. Mosquitoes were a plenty here and they had a buffet of my blood!
Afterwards, we drove to our next hotel, Grand Cosmos Resort, Ruisui. The resort is like an amusement park and resembles a European castle. There’s multiple buildings, water slides, a European market, Taiwanese market, giant chess set, archery, a spa and laundromat. We got tokens (400 TWD, $12) to spend at the markets, and so we picked up a few delicious Taiwan snacks to try.
Food for the day:
Breakfast at the evergreen resort hotel: They had sticky rice, sticky rice meatballs (very time consuming to make, so I’m surprised they had this!), and chicken feet! I love sticky rice!
Lunch at Aredetay: a high end fine dining restaurant that uses local aboriginal ingredients with a modern twist. Each dish is so intricately plated. Pictured are white jade snail on top of toast, and rice bundles (hunters bento box).
For example, the “hunters bento box” is filled with glutinous rice mixed with millet and canned preserved salted pork wrapped in a tree leaf and reminded me of Joong, but in mini form.
And this is a salad of various aboriginal field greens with a sauce made with a bitter “tomatillo”. The sauce was too bitter for me, but everything else was good.
The chef is Amis, educated in Taipei, but decided to open his own restaurant in 2020 in Guangfu.
Chihshang to Chihpen
As we continued traveling southward on the eastern side of Taiwan, the weather was getting hotter and hotter. Luckily the activities for the day were not strenuous and involved a leisurely bike ride through rice fields, a museum visit, and then relaxing at one of the oldest historical thermal spa hotels in Taiwan.
All along the rural roads of eastern Taiwan, we could see fruit stands and betel nut trees/stands, from the comfort of our air conditioned bus. (We had 18 people on the tour, but a 50 seat bus, so plenty of room to spread out!) Interestingly, due to the various altitudes and mountain ranges, microclimates allow for almost every fruit, except durian, to be grown in Taiwan. Betel nut trees also lined the roads. Every time we saw a colorful flashing neon “star”, our group jokingly asked our tour guide if we could try betel nut, an addictive stimulant that is popular among truck drivers because chewing the fibrous wad gives a high equivalent to several shots of espresso. Our guide of course declined. I’m sure there are tour guide rules…since betel nut is now a known carcinogen.
Here are the days highlights in pictures:
In the morning, we got to ride these electric 4 person bikes for an hour around the rice fields of Taiwan. The rice that is grown in this field won competitions in Taiwan and you can buy small bags at their store where we rented the electric bikes.
We followed the local tour guide, and the views were amazing.
We had plenty of photo op stops. This one was made famous by a Mr. Brown instant coffee ad. In fact, if you look up the road on Google maps, Google labels this as “Brown Boulevard”.
And this photo stop was made famous by an EVA air advertisement. (EVA air is a Taiwanese airline)
After lunch, we went to the National Prehistory Museum. This museum underwent a major remodel last year, so the building and displays looked quite modern. In this museum, we learned about how the first human inhabitants came to Taiwan. During the ice age, a strait connected Taiwan to China, and there was evidence of animal and human migration during that time (20,000 to 30,000 years ago). Further migration (5,000 years ago) to Taiwan after the ice age came from austronesian sea travel (the islands between and including Easter island, Polynesia, and Madagascar). The Taiwanese aboriginals were believed to be descendants of the austronesian sea travelers. The museum had plenty of English panels to read, which was nice.
The Hotel Royal Chipen that we stayed at for the night, is supposed to be one of the original Spa hotels of Taiwan, so the spas here were a bit older looking in comparison to the one we went to at Jaioxi. But to make up for it, the hotel had a lot to explore on the hotel grounds: for example, there was a bird enclosure with different birds and bunnies. Pictured above is a Pineapple conure
Hotel Royal Chipen: Formosa sika deer (photo credits to Junli on our tour)
Hotel Royal Chipen: You can even cook your egg with the thermal waters that heat the spas. How cool is that?!
Hotel Royal Chipen: And in the evening after dinner, the hotel had an aboriginal dance performance put on by students in the lobby. Normally if the weather was good, they would do the performance in their outdoor amphitheater.
Food for the day:
For breakfast, we went non-Asian and had the eggs Benedict, so I don’t want to show you that…
We had lunch at Wariyan, which is right next to the prehistory museum. I had the scallop risotto and David had the beef pasta, but the star of the show was this beautifully plated tiramisu.
We filled our tummies with fish, squid, shrimp, clams, Taiwan pork, blood sausages, and a variety of veggies. The blood sausage was mixed with rice and had an interesting texture. The sauces were also a bit different compared to the states. They had grated radish, Taiwanese BBQ sauce, sesame oil, raw garlic, scallions, ginger, hot oil, and a sour fruit puree that you mix and match to make your sauce. Thanks to Eleen on the tour for showing us how to make a delicious dipping sauce!
For dessert, we had this custard apple (cherimoya) in our room. There were fruit stands all along the rural roads of eastern Taiwan, and our tour guide bought everyone a custard apple to try, all thanks to Diana on our tour group for asking if we could try some. You break open the apple with your hands (it’s super soft) and scoop out the flesh to eat, spitting out the seeds. It was sweet, creamy and delicious. Much better than the cherimoyas we get here.
Donggang to Kaohsiung
Today is the halfway point of our tour—Day 5 of the tour. In the morning, we took the train from Chihpen to Kaohsiung (Southeastern Taiwan to Southwestern Taiwan) while the bus drove our luggage to meet us at the end of the train station. The reason for this was because the railway tracks are elevated on this southern stretch of the highway, allowing for spectacular ocean views compared to the views from a bus, so the tour company decided to spend the money to get us train tickets to experience this. Afterwards, we toured Fu Wan, the only bean to bar chocolate factory in Taiwan and experience our first night market on the trip. Our tour guide got sick this day and couldn’t join us. We were really worried until we heard that afternoon from our stand-in tour guide Peter, that Manu was OK.
Mesmerizing ocean views from the train
Fu Wan Chocolate plantation and factory tour: cocoa pods growing on the tree. Can you see the two tiny flowers on the right? Those will grow to the large pods you see on the left
We got to taste the pulp that houses each bean inside of a freshly opened cocoa pod
We also got to make our own chocolate. Here’s my creation. David made a heart for me and I made one for him! 💕
And then we got to taste 9 different chocolates. They generously gave us each 9 whole squares of different flavors to try. The ones infused with tea were a bit odd for me, but apparently it’s one of their best sellers. And of course the tour ends at the gift shop where we can buy some bars at roughly 400TWD ($12) for a 45g bar.
Hotel Royal Chipen breakfast: I had the oden fish balls, oden tofu pocket that was also a fish ball of some sort, bao, Sui mai, some pork floss, and Taiwan sausage
Lunch at A-Rong Seafood restaurant in Donggang: We had another feast of abalone, sashimi, red shrimp, calamari salad, fried fish, fish hot pot, fried rice, German pork knuckle. The unveiling of the abalone was quite the show, as it came encased in a rectangular block of salt that had to be hammered open. Shown here are the Appetizers and passionfruit drink. I didn’t care for the fish roe skewers.
A-Rong Seafood restaurant in Donggang: this fried rice had swordfish floss and these very deep red dried shrimp. It was soooo good!
A-Rong Seafood restaurant in Donggang : German pork knuckles served with a mustard sauce
Dinner at Rueifong Night market: Our tour guide gave us 800 TWD each to spend at the market, but after filling our tummies, we could only spend 600 TWD for two, and that included Taiwanese style mochi and two bubble teas not pictured below.The food at the night market is so cheap! No wonder it’s so crowded with shoulder to shoulder of people and long lines. Here’s the juicy fried chicken we had. It’s the size of my face, but was only 100 TWD. So good!
Rueifong Night market: Lee Chi Green onion pancakes with egg (60 TWD). It was right next to the fried chicken stall. The pancake was super fluffy, but with a nice chew. So good! At this stall, you had to grab a number and wait for him to call your number to order. Then after ordering, you have to wait again for him to call your number to pick up your food. Good thing I brushed up on my Chinese numbers before the trip! Ha ha
Rueifong Night market: Papaya milk was 50TWD (blended fresh papaya with milk). It was just ok, and not as refreshing as I thought.
Rueifong Night market: fried Stinky tofu was 80TWD. Ok, now I can say I ate it, and check that box off, but it’s just not something I would get again…
Rueifong Night market: Fatty pork belly sandwich in a flaky bun was 80TWD. The sandwich looked impressive, but the pork needed a bit more flavor. Maybe a squirt of hot sauce or hoisin sauce would have helped?
Kaohsiung to Tainan
Yay, our tour guide was feeling better today, and he took us for a stroll around the art district of Kaohsiung in the morning. He even showed us the theater where his wife had produced a play. The art district is pretty neat, and everywhere you turn were art—even the outdoor air conditioners were painted with some art.
After the morning walk, we had lunch and then drove to Tainan to check into our next hotel.
In Tainan, we had shaved ice, visited the Confucius Temple, one of Taiwan’s oldest shrines, and the Hayashi Department store, a 5 story department store with state of the art elevators built during Japanese rule.
Here are some highlights in pictures:
Dome of Light, a 4500 glass panel art installation by Narcissus Quagliata 2004-2007, at the Formosa train station
A stroll along the banks of Kaohshing Love River. The river’s name comes from a typhoon that blew the sign of the Love River Cruise shop, one leaving only the first two characters. The newspaper pictures of the typhoon’s devastation showing the damaged shop sign led to the rivers nickname that soon stuck.
Kaohsiung art district walk
Kaohsiung art district walk
Louisa coffee is the Starbucks of Taiwan
Food for the day:
Breakfast at Kaohsiung H2O hotel: they had made to order French toast and Laksa seafood noodle soup along with a buffet of Asian and western foods
Lunch at Lui Chai Taiwan Juancun food: beef noodle soup, pickled cabbage and pork hot pot, green onion pancakes and beef rolls, smashed cucumbers, bamboo shoots, and steamed cake
Lily Fruit: Shaved ice in Tainan that’s near by the Confucius temple. Can you tell which two shaved ice are ours? Yup, NO BEANS ALLOWED, especially in my shaved ice! Those who know me, know I’m bean adversed! (Remember my “no beans allowed” chili recipe?) Hee hee. The other bowl is the tour guide’s shaved ice.
Fruit stand at Lily Fruit
Dinner at Fu Lou in Tainan: We had fish balls, Taiwanese sausages, pork knuckles, fish, sticky rice, and various veggies, but the unique dish was this stir fried tender fern shoots with anchovies. It was really good!
The other unique dish was this candied taro and sweet potato. It comes out piping hot, and while the sugar is still molten, you take each piece and dunk it in ice to harden the sugar coating and eat it. We were glad Amy L on our tour knew what to do!
Tainan
This morning, we went to Ten Drum Cultural Village. This was formerly the Rende Sugar Refinery built during Japanese colonial times. The refinery was permanently closed in 2003. In 2005, the Ten Drums percussion group decided to use this space for rehearsal and performances. Walking through the grounds of the refinery, you can still see the remnants of railroad tracks, refinery smoke stacks, and various machineries used in the sugar milling process.After the refinery tour, we got to practice drumming, watch a performance by the Ten Drums group and enjoy a refreshing sugar cane popsicle.
Yes, genius. Of course they would sell sugar cane juice and popsicles at a former historic sugar refinery!
Tour of the refinery
Our group got to practice playing the drums! So fun!
Our drum teacher taught in mandarin, but the X’s and triangles are a universal language.
The Ten Drums Group Performance
In the afternoon, we visited the Anping Tree House, walked around Anping Old Fort (formerly a Dutch built fort in 1624, acquired by the Chinese in 1662, and then rebuilt during Japanese occupation 1900’s), and then enjoyed a private sunset cruise of the Anping Canal.
PS: There was a small street market at Anping Old Fort area where they had an automatic shrimp chip maker that I wanted to show you, but the video wouldn’t upload here. Basically, every few seconds, a shrimp chip would pop out of the machine. It was neat to watch and try to figure out what was happening on the inside…
Anping Tree House: the pictures do not do this justice. It’s basically a banyan tree that just went crazy and grew to cover the salt warehouse that was originally here. The roots now form the roof of the warehouse, and there are walk ways built to see above the tree’s top. It’s amazing how powerful the roots of a tree can be, and reminds me that we better chop down that tree back at home before its roots cause havoc!
The tour chartered a private boat and we enjoyed a Sunset boat cruise at Anping Canal
Breakfast at Tainan Silks Place: a make your own Taiwanese “burrito” with pork belly, eggs, peanuts, and cilantro as the filling, clear beef soup, and coffee
Breakfast: David also tried this neritic squid. I was too full to try it. We had no idea what it was, but figured it must be special if they limited it to one per person, so one of us should try it.
Lunch at Chi Kan West House, a vegetarian restaurant. We had to literally walk past these cute turtles to enter the restaurant!
Lunch: one of many vegetarian dishes we had. This is a rice roll similar to the Vietnamese rice rolls we can get here in the Bay Area, but the stand out dish was the truffle risotto. I didn’t take a picture, but wished I did—it was so good!
Dinner in Tainan: I’m not sure about the name of the restaurant. The outside just said traditional Tainan Feast, and Google was no help either. But it’s a Michelin star restaurant and one of their specialties is this noodle soup pictured below. They make this in the traditional wooden cart shown above, which I originally thought was just for show, so imagine my surprise when they literally picked up this huge cart and carried it off on their shoulders after serving us!
Danzai noodles from the cart
Lukang to Sun Moon Lake
This morning, we drove to Lukang, where we were driven around town on electric bikes. (I personally think we could have just walked around town, but I think the tour guide thought the heat and humidity would making walking difficult.) The town used to be an important seaport during Dutch colonial times, but is now more known for its well preserved historical buildings and quaint old town alleys. We had fun meandering through some of the narrow streets and trying some delicacies.
We then had lunch in Lukang before driving to Sun Moon Lake to spend the last night of our tour.
Longshan Temple: one of the largest Buddhist temples in Lukang dedicated to Guanyin, the goddess of mercy. The guide explained a bit about the architecture and ornate dragon and tiger carvings on the temple’s 3 doorways. In Asian culture, it is auspicious to enter with the dragon, and exit with the tiger. Avoid the middle door, as that is reserved for the gods. So in other words, we entered the right door and left through the left door, moving through the temple in a counter clockwise fashion. The entrance also had a raised wooden lip at the entryway, and so you are to always step over the lip with your right foot, and never step on the raised lip. Inside the temple, our tour guide taught us how to properly ask the deities our desired questions and throw 3 wooden tokens for our answer, so we asked Guanyin our questions, and then admired the nice courtyards.
Breast Touching Lane, is named as such because it is so narrow that only one person can walk through. A gentleman trying to pass may brush against a woman’s breast.
We tried some dried salted fish roe in Lukang “old street”. The guy just cut it up into cubes for us to eat, but typically, this is best minced and put into fried rice, which we had one of the earlier nights for dinner.
Rooftop views of Sun Moon Lake from our hotel Fleur de Chine
Relaxing with an in room hot tub soak overlooking Sun Moon Lake
From our hotel, we could walk across the street to access the lake. So in the late afternoon, we hiked around the lake followed by hunting for fireflies once it got dark. By the way, we DID see fireflies. Really cool!
Food for the day:
I didn’t take pictures of our breakfast at Silks Place Tainan. That morning, we went for the breakfast buffet at the international ballroom of the hotel as opposed to the Tainan specialty food on the 4th floor (since we tried that yesterday morning already).
Lunch in Lukang. I forgot the restaurant name, so I will need to consult Norman on our tour. He was amazingly diligent at taking notes of where we went and what we ate. Again, we had plenty of specialties like a Thai inspired salad, noodles, white fungus soup, and another soup called Buddha Jumps Over the Wall (it’s regarded as a Chinese delicacy with many ingredients such as sea cucumber, scallops, abalone, fish maw, etc that even vegetarian monks would be tempted to break religion). Eleen told me that a Chinese banquet in LA with this soup would be $1000! But, ha, my palette must not be that refined. The Buddha Jumps Over the Wall soup was not my favorite—pictured above was my favorite—sticky rice topped with pork and mushrooms and steamed in lotus leaves. Yes, I love sticky rice!
This Lukang restaurant was frequented by Chang Kai sheks son and hence prominently advertised.
PS: I contacted Amy L on our trip and she remembered the restaurant name! It’s Hai Wei Zhen, a seafood restaurant.
Dinner at the Fluer de Chine at Sun Moon Lake: we had Peking duck in thin wraps
Dinner at the Fluer de Chine at Sun Moon Lake: We also had sushi, roasted pork, oysters, chawan mushi, and even a deep pink dragon fruit juice (not pictured)! The buffet here was really good!
Desserts were good too!
Sun Moon Lake to Tainan
Today is the last day of our official tour, but we still ended up doing a lot on this day. In the morning, we hiked around the lake before checking out of the hotel. Then we had a private boat cruise around Sun Moon lake before leaving for lunch in the town of Puli. After lunch, we visited the Wufeng Lin family mansion where we enjoyed a musical performance and tea in their home theater.
In the evening, we arrived back in Taipei. We said our good byes to our newly made friends, and everyone went their separate ways. We booked an extra night in Taipei, so we checked in to our hotel and then used the MRT cards that our tour guide had given us to take the train to Shinlin Night Market for dinner.
Early morning hike around Sun Moon Lake
Cruise around Sun Moon Lake on this private chartered boat
Dam at Sun Moon Lake
Musical Performance and tea at Wufeng Lin Family mansion’s theater in Taichung
Wufeng Lin Family mansion: Lin was a famous army commander during the Qing Dynasty. His residence is one of the largest Qing Dynasty official residences and has many “rows” or houses with intricate carvings, and gardens. There’s even a theater in the Flower Hall where guests of the past were entertained. The house is actually a restoration after extensive damage from the 1999 earthquake.
Food for the day:
Lunch in Puli: appetizers (calimari salad, smoked fish, drunken chicken, pickled tomatoes) served on a Taiwan shaped plate.
Lunch at Puli: pork belly cooked in a special paper (paper used for calligraphy), mantou with charcoal, stir fried vermicelli, black chicken stewed soup
Lunch at Puli: bitter melon strips fried and coated in salted egg yolk. The melon didn’t taste bitter at all and I really liked this dish!
Lunch at Puli: red shrimp and seafood hot pot
Dinner: We inserted our MRT cards from the tour into the train station and discovered each card still had 33TWD, so all we needed to do was insert 7TWD for each card to enable us to do a round trip on the red line to Shinlin Night Market. And bonus, I got to use up some of those pesky loose coins I’ve been lugging around in my purse.
Dinner at Shinlin Night Market: This stall was pretty unique. It’s a Taiwanese sausage tucked inside a split sausage of sticky rice. Yup, you got me at sticky rice! So good!
Dinner at Shinlin Night Market: We wanted the beef and cheese, but they ran out, so we tried the beef and kimchi buns. They were delicious too.
SShinlin night market: We had oyster omelets at this stall. Interestingly the sauce was put on top and was much more gravy like compared to the oyster omelet we had at the Lukang restaurant where the omelet came naked and you dip it into a miso based brown sauce.
Well, that’s the end of our Taiwan trip! The next morning, we walked to Leechi Taipei to buy several boxes of pineapple cakes for souvenirs. We had read here that the 3 best are ChiaTe, Leechi Taipei, and Sunny Hills. And keep in mind that these fresh ones usually have only a two week expiration date. So seeing that one week will already be taken up with our Seoul trip after Taiwan, I didn’t want to buy the pineapple cakes too early, else by the time I give them out as omiyage at home, they would be expired! Our flight was at 2PM, so my game plan was to walk to Leechi Taipei to be in time for when the store opens at 9AM. Pick up my boxes, then back to the hotel to pack these boxes in the checked bags (they’re kinda heavy), and then take Uber to the airport. Yes, Uber works in Taiwan! Hooray! Once at the airport, go to the sunny hills Kiosk and buy a few more boxes of pineapple cakes as carry ons. Success! And back at home, we had a side by side taste test and vote of these pineapple cakes. It was fun!