OK, actually it started with a flight from Seattle to Seoul, South Korea. But it was only 1 night so that hardly counts. Asia is difficult to find deals using points so when you find a flight from Seattle for only 30k points so we jumped on it even though we didn’t really want more than a night in Seoul. It is COLD in January. We spent a week in Seoul a few years ago and didn’t feel like we need much more than a night in freezing weather. But we were missing Korean BBQ. We took the train to the center of Seoul, had some pretty good KBBQ and then spent one night in a way too small hotel room. The next day we were heading to our real first destination – Taipei, Taiwan.
The original plan was to spend a week in Taipei and then a week doing some hiking in the Taroko National Park. But you may remember that last year there was a huge earthquake on the East Coast of Taiwan and it really messed up the roads and bridges of the places where we wanted to go. So, we decided on 1 week in Taipei to decide if Taiwan is really a place we would visit in the future when infrastructure was rebuilt. Spoiler alert – We liked it… We will be back. We started with the “free” walking tour like we do in most big cities. It gave us a great background on the history of Taipei that is left out of our American education.
The top of our list for Taipei was the night markets. Tons of different types of food for fairly cheap. We are proud of the variety of stuff we tried and most stuff we really liked. We weren’t going for the organ meats or the stinky tofu but I don’t feel bad about that. Street food is probably one of the reasons why we will eventually return to Taiwan. We visited 2 night markets but also had a lot of lunches from street carts. It is always crowded but we loved eating from multiple different stands until you have a full meal.
We also did several day trips away from downtown. One day we took a gondola up into the tea farms in the hills about the city. We did some hiking, learned about tea making and got to taste their Taiwanese tea. We then took the Gondola back down to the Taiwan zoo and got to see real life Panda bears.
Another day, we took a train out to the old mining town of Shifen. We walked to a waterfall, ate some more street food but decided to pass on the town’s main attraction of releasing hot air balloons from the train tracks that ran through the middle of town. You are supposed to write your dreams and hopes on the balloons and then release them into the wind. There were balloons stuck in trees all around the area and it didn’t seem like the right thing for us to contribute to the environmental blight. After Shifen we went up to the tourist town of Jiufen. It had great views back towards the city and is famous for a tea shop that reminds people of the anime movie “Spirited Away”. We walked through the alleys crammed with people looking at touristy shops and it reminded us of the cruise ship hordes of people in Seattle’s Pike Place Market. We found a place to rest for a beer and then left rather quickly.
We did see some museums in town. We saw the Taiwan history and natural history museum and the Taiwan Miniature Museum. I think we enjoyed looking at the weird dollhouses more than the history stuff. The next road trip we took was an attempt to get to the waterfront of Taipei. We took the metro out to the end of the line. We found more fantastic food stalls and had our second try at the ice cream roll. They start with a huge chunk of peanut brittle and shave it off with a scraper to make sugary peanut dust. They then fill a crepe with the peanut dust, ice cream and cilantro and wrap it up into a burrito. Not sure why cilantro is added but it really works! We also found a “creepy” museum which was a cross between the Old Curiosity shop in Seattle and Ripley’s Believe it or Not museums. We found shrunken heads and lot of animals with 2 heads.
Taiwan was an easy city to visit. Excellent food everywhere and most is reasonably priced. And everyone was very friendly and helpful – not just tourist industry folks, but also random shopkeepers we walked by who wanted to wish us happy new year, as well as a gaggle of older men in the park who wanted to talk to me as I was birdwatching. Besides street food, we ate in a lot of restaurants including sushi, hot pot, noodles, and dumplings. We had a great meal of noodles near our hotel that cost us $7 total. But then we found a cocktail bar around the corner and had 4 world class cocktails for about $50. Yes you can be cheap here but sometimes it is good to splurge. There is so much that we haven’t tried that we have to come back. So many of the friendly people we talked to talked about how we must get to the South of the island. The bucket list continues to grow. We gotta come back for East coast hikes as well as the South.
But now it is time to move on. We are moving further South to get even warmer. Next stop- our 41st country- The Philippines.