Continued from the last post. It’s been a month since I wrote about the first half of our itinerary. The second half and remaining part of our itinerary is about done, so here goes!
Hualien was included since the early itinerary iterations, and have remained put. To be sure the singular most important place to check-out when visiting Hualien is Taroko Gorge, but a check with work colleagues who’ve been to the town also pretty much say there’s nothing particularly of interest in the town itself. The other interesting bits come out if you have more time to spend in the county. Specifically, by driving down south, you’ll get some really spectacular coastal scenery on one side, and on the other, the flat lands of East Rift Valley. So, one iteration of our plan in September included spending two full days in Hualien just for this drive down south. We ended up discarding the southerly inclusion though: Ling felt that we’d really just be spending much of the additional time in the car with just a few stop points to soak in the sights.
Up till end-Oct, the plan was to race to Hualien from Taichung by early morning trains, dump our luggage at the accommodation, then spend the rest of the day touring Taroko Gorge – probably just about 3 hours given the shorter days in winter season. Come the following morning, we’d head back to Taipei, reach there by noon and spend the rest of the day visiting Elephant Mountain and the nearby places. We underestimated though the total amount of time to make the journey from Taichung to Hualien via Taipei, including actual train timings, and also transfers that involve two kids and luggage. Moreover, the main reason we’re doing Hualien is because of Taroko Gorge, so it didn’t make sense for us not to center our Hualien segment around just that.
After the itinerary flip-flops, we decided to go back to two days in Hualien: we’d arrive in Hualien, take it easy for the rest of the day, move the visit to Taroko Gorge to the next day, and return to Taipei in the evening. Sure, we’d be giving up a half-day to spend in Taipei, but we won’t have to rush the Gorge now – especially considering again how much day light we’ll have in winter. Accommodation-wise, we’ll be putting up in an Airbnb stay owned by a retired couple who is also living in the same house. Ling read about setting off small fireworks on the beach, and figured the kids would really enjoy that on the arrival eveningt.
Unlike our Taichung and Taipei segments, we haven’t booked a driver yet to bring us around Hualien and Taroko Gorge, on account that we’ll likely just call for one once we’ve settled into our place of stay in the town.
Finally onto Taipei: it was also easier working out a basic itinerary for the six days we’ve got in the capital. Like our other family vacations at this point, we had to find a balance between finding things that are familiar with the kids and be easy attractions for the two – i.e. children parks and playgrounds – against things that are atypical of a modern built-up city and what we won’t be able to see in Singapore. Of the six days, we have set aside just two days out of the city to visit Jehliu, Shifen, Jiufen and Yangmingshan:
Shifen and Jiufen: there are numerous day trip operators out of Taipei to these two old towns, with the latter town famously the inspiration behind Hayao Miyazaki’s 2001 animation film Spirited Away. Some of the day trips out also include visits to Yehliu Geopark where there are interesting rock formations, though it could be challenging trying to do three attractions in a single day, right in winter where we get less daylight even. One variation we’re also considering is to spend a night in Jiufen, which some commenters have said is well worth the additional expense. Even though the small town doesn’t really have a night-life, the scenery at night when the lights come on is said to be just stunning.
We had a lot of changes for the Yehliu/Shifen/Jiufen, but after we finally decided to spend an overnight in Jiufen – just so that I can try taking night-shots of the town – we essentially booked our driver around that. The first day will see us driving out of Taipei to Yehliu Geopark first, then Shifen town and waterfall, and finally to Jiufen. There were several properties for short rental in the latter, with the vast majority of them essentially seeing guests sharing a home with locals. Jiufen town itself is fairly small and compact, so the properties were invariably within easy walking distance of the town center – though they all also caution that their properties can be hard to find/lots of stairs to climb, so here are our detailed read-them-and-weep instructions to get to our place haha. Our driver will return the next morning to pick us up from Jiufen, and head to Yangmingshan for the morning, and then a new inclusion – the small city of Danshui – at early to mid-afternoon onwards – and we’ll finish off with a return back to Taipei. Yangmingshan is a fairly large park north of Taipei and also where there are some apparently well-known hot springs. Ling is actually quite interested dipping into the latter, while I’m less enthused about it.
The Taipei driver rates we got were also, not surprisingly, lower than what we routinely were quoted for Taichung. The norm for the latter were around SGD200/TWD4,500, while the Taipei drivers were as low as SGD90/TWD2,000 to SGD160/TWD3,600. I reckon the obvious price differential is in view of the longer distances between place to place around the Taichung area, or just that there’s less of a glut of drivers looking for jobs in Taichung compared to Taipei.
As it is, we’re keeping the rest of the Taipei itinerary flexible. Of the spots in the city itself, there’s a couple of mandatory spots that we built our itinerary around:
Taipei 101: the one time world’s tallest skyscraper until the Burj Khalifa surpassed it. While the tower is built to withstand earthquakes, here’s hoping that it’s not actually put to the test when we’re there haha!
Elephant Mountain: or more specifically, sunset at this vantage point that overlooks Taipei city.
Night Markets: there are a number in the city, so we’re just picking a few that are along the way or in the vicinity of each day’s plan.
And that’s it. Not quite enough mandatory spots to take us through two days of course – so we’ll fill it up based on whether by Day 10, we still have any energy left!
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