Categories
Reason #1-20:       Fascinating Customs
Reason #21-40:     Unique Cultures
Reason #41-60:     Incredible Food
Reason #61-80:     Exhilarating Adventure
Reason #81-100:   Breathtaking Nature

1. Buddhist Education at Dharma Drum Mountain
2. Visit Dajia Mazu (Mother of Ship) at Chen Lan Palace
3. Zhongtai Zen Monastery Tour
4. Visit the largest monastery in FoGuangShan
5. Discover the true spirit of Buddhism and the world of Tzuchi at Jing-Si Jing She
6. Visit the largest Yi Guan Dao Practice Center in Southeast Asia: Shenwei Tiantai Mountain
7. Quite contemplation at Confucius Temple
8. Make a wish at LongShan Temple Tour
9. East meets West: Wutai Catholic Church: catholic church go native
10. Visit the first organic rural village in Taiwan at the Sixty Stones Mountain
11. Sleepless Taipei: City Night Tour
12. Hit and Bat with the locals at LA Dodger's Hong Chi Kuo and Washington Nationals' Chien-Ming Wang's home country
13. Tai-Chi Lesson with the Master
14. Dare-you-not: a visit to the Snake Alley
15. The Holiday Jade and Flower Market the largest in Asia
16. Learn Chinese calligraphy
17. Indulge yourself in a full-body Chinese massage and acupuncture
18. Foot massage in Dihua Street
19. Health check-up with Chinese medicine doctor
20. Visit the largest wind damper in the world in Taipei 101
21. Experience the traditional Taiwanese Puppet Show in Yunlin
22. Take a Tour at Miaoli Syanyi: the town of wood sculpture
23. Trace the footprints of early ethnic Hakka culture within the Neiwan Beipu old street
24. Visit the Chiang Kai-Shek's mausoleum in Daxi Taoyuan
25. Lose yourself in the "skyless streets" in Lugang Village
26. Tour the historical sites of the ancient capital: Tainan
27. Experience the real-life battlefield scenes in Matzu and Kinmen
28. Visit the world's 5th largest museum: National Palace Museum
29. Lost in Translation: Taiwanese Opera
30. Mandarin for Beginner: Mandarin class
31. Visit the historic mining town of Jiufen
32. Chinese Fortune Telling
33. Explore the world of Ami tribe in Hualien Mataian
34. Unravel the mysteries of the prehistoric Amis village in Dulan Taitung
35. Trace the steps of the Tsou Tribe in Alishan
36. Join the Tao Tribe and legendary Flying Fish in Orchid Island
37. Enjoy the traditional performances at the Formosan Aboriginal Culture Village
38. Pay tribute to the aboriginal struggle of the Japanese occupation at the Mona Rudao Memorial Monument
39. Experience the Hakka culture in Meinong Folk Village
40. Experience the Taiwanese pop culture in Ximending
41. Taiwanese cuisine at its best: Aoba Restaurant
42. Venture into Taiwan's largest night market: Shilin Night Market for a culinary adventure
43. Yilan Lotung Night Market
44. Indulge yourself at the national capital of street food: Tainan
45. Experience a spiritual and culinary dialogue at Shi-Yan Culture Restaurant
46. Keelung Night Market
47. Aboriginal feast in Taroko Gorge
48. Jiayi Night Market
49. Fresh seafood feast at Cijin Island
50. World-famous dumpling restaurant Din Tai Fung
51. How hot are you: Spicy hot pot at Ding Wang Hot Pot Restaurant
52. Kaohsiung Liuhe Night Market
53. Taichung Funjia Night Market
54. National dish: beef noodle soup
55. Tea tasting and cuisine at Tea House
56. Challenge your taste bud: Stinky tofu
57. Medicinal cuisine experience
58. Stir-Fried par Excellence, Taiwanese stir-fried restaurant
59. Ethnic Hakka cuisine at Tung Flower Restaurant
60. Vegetarian's paradise
61. Hike along the high mountain tea plantation in Alishan Shizhao
62. Rock climbing in Long Dong: world's premier costal climbing
63. Ancient trial in National Park
64. Climb the highest peak in Taiwan: Jade Mountain
65. Trekking through the waterfall in Baiyang Trail
66. Snorkeling in Green Island
67. Ride along the abandoned railway tracks in Taichung Shuangfeng Bikeway
68. Ride along the Pacific Coast
69. Experience Paragliding at Luye Gaotai
70. Cycling through Sun Moon Lake
71. River-tracing in Taroko Gorge
72. Test your limit at the river rafting in Hualien
73. Wind-surfing in Penghu
74. Scuba Diving in Penghu
75. Soak in Beitou Hotspring
76. Pamper yourself at the sacred black hot spring bath in Guanziling
77. Experience hot and cold spring at Jiaoxi Spring Spa
78. Stroll through the hot spring street in Wulai
79. Experience the salt-water hot spring by the sea in Green Island
80. Hike along the Mt. Maolan Trail with the view of black tea farm
81. River Cruise on Love River
82. Whale watch at Gueishan Island
83. Bird watch in Cigui: Black-faced spoonbill
84. Bird watch at Yilan Swamplands: water birds
85. Bird watch at Kenting National Park: Grey Frog Hawk and Buzzard Eagle
86. Eco-friendly visit to the Butterfly Valley
87. Visit the cat-friendly town of Hotong
88. Dolphin watch in Hualien
89. Boat ride on the Sun Moon Lake
90. Tunnel of Nine Turns: the most scenic route of the Taroko Gorge
91. North-East Coast and Caoling Historic Trail
92. Evening walk with the fireflies in Carp Pond in Hualien
93. Breathtakinf view of the Bagua tea field
94. Walk through the Lion's Head Mountain Trial
95. Escape to the mountain: Maokong Gondola
96. Yehliu "Queens' Head" Rock Formation
97. See the volcanic eruption at Siaoyuken Yangminsan
98. Salt field in Tainan
99. Island-hoppings in Penghu
100. A zen meditation on the Pacific Coast

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Five Reasons Why Taiwan should be on your bucket list...

10th October 2011 marks the 100th anniversary of the Republic of China. Although deposed from mainland China in 1949, the ROC government still controls Taiwan (as well as a few off-shore possessions). Despite having an immensely rich cultural and spiritual heritage, amazing food, world-class hot-springs and stunning scenery, Taiwan is normally thought of more for its exports than as a place to get into.  We think this is a shame, as the island has enough going for it to make any traveller’s bucket list.

Scenery

Visually stunning, Taiwan is a shutter-bug’s paradise. Running down Taiwan’s spine is the Central Mountain Range, a magnet for mountaineers looking to scale East Asia’s tallest peak, Yushan (Jade Mountain). Photographers are drawn daily as Yushan’s peak is the perfect spot from which to catch a shot of the ‘sea of clouds’ sweeping over the mountains at dawn. Taiwan’s beaches are beautiful as well, offering some of East Asia’s finest surfing and windsurfing spots.

SEE: Running along a thin strip of land between the Central Mountains and the Pacific, Taiwan’s East Coast Highway is easily one of East Asia’s most beautiful spots for cycling.

Cuisine

Taiwan draws much of its culinary heritage from China, but to label it ‘Chinese food’ is an oversimplification. When the first Han settlers came from China, the recipes and cooking styles they brought along met the ingredients and culinary traditions of Taiwan’s aboriginal peoples and became something new and different. This new cuisine was further modified, first by new immigrants from other areas of China, and later by the Japanese who ruled the island for 50 years. Seafood, sweet potatoes, taro root and green vegetables cooked very simply are at the heart of many traditional Taiwanese sit-down meals, while roadside stands and night market stalls offer variety worthy of its own story to those who enjoy eating al-fresco.

EAT: Perhaps the best place for foodies to taste what Taiwan has to offer is at the local night market. Which one is best is a source of heated debate, but for our money the Keelung Night Market (about an hour from Taipei) is tops, offering both an excellent selection and plenty of signs in understandable (and sometimes amusing) English.

Hot springs

Being located on top of the geologically unstable ‘ring of fire’ has one major upside – no matter where on the island you go, you’re bound to be within shouting distance of an amazing natural hot spring. Taiwan is home to one of the globe’s only accessible seawater hot springs, the Sunrise Spring on Green Island (a small island off the southeast coast). You don’t even need to leave Taipei to soak:  a quick hike from Taipei’s Xin Beitou metro stop is where you’ll find hotels and resorts offering piped-in sulphur hot springs, said to be the all-around healthiest for the skin. There’s also an excellent public hot spring.

SOAK: Two hours by train or bus from Taipei, the east-coast town of Jiaoshi draws hot-spring lovers from around the island. (There’s even a hot-spring fed fountain outside the train station that folks soak their feet in). Jiaoshi’s Art Spa Hotel has one of the town’s best public spas, with multiple pools and Taiwan’s only hot-spring waterslide.

Temples

Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian temples abound throughout Taiwan, not merely as static tourist attractions, but as active centres of culture and worship. Must-see temples in Taipei include Longshan & Guandu temples (both of which have their own metro stations). The southern city of Tainan is a must-visit for temple lovers, and if you’re willing to take a 40-minute flight to the windswept penghu archipelago, you’ll be able to explore dozens of East Asia’s most gorgeously ostentatious – and least visited – temples.

EXPLORE:  Past a small gate in the heart of Taipei’s ultra-fashionable Ximending district at 51 Chengdu Rd lies the small but utterly fascinating Tien-ho temple, complete with statues of Matsu (the Empress of Heaven) and ancient Chinese generals, a bell tower and a small dragon-shaped pond filled with huge carp.

Museums

Taiwan offers no shortage of activities for the erudite, and the capital’s vibrant museum scene is yet another of its understated attractions. The most famous of these is the National Palace Museum in Taipei, which houses a sizable chunk of China’s artistic heritage (taken – or rescued, depending on who you ask – by Nationalist troops fleeing China in 1949). So voluminous is this collection, which ranges from paintings and scrolls to ancient porcelain and statues, that only a fraction of it is ever on display at once. 

LEARN: Taipei has dozens of other excellent museums catering to a wide variety of interests from modern art (The Museum of Contemporary Art) to religion (The Museum of World Religions) to very, very tiny things (The Miniatures Museum)

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Tao Temple in Taiwan

You don’t need to know the history of the Catholic Church to appreciate a cathedral. And you equally don’t need to understand 5000 years of Chinese culture to take something away from a visit to a Taoist temple. The incense smoke may never clear inside but that doesn’t mean the experience should make your eyes glaze over. A little connoisseurship can be picked up rather easily.

The basics

House of worship, community centre, marketplace and front for organized crime: a temple can be all these things and quite a lot more. But it’s also simply a building, in essence a raised platform atop which sits a collection of halls. Each hall has a wood post and beam frame (joined without nails), a gabled roof with overhanging eaves, and a sweeping roof that tapers out like the tail end of a swallowtail (and is indeed called a swallowtail roof, or ridgeline). 

The collection of halls is arranged in a predictable manner. First, a main gate opens onto a stone courtyard, at the back of which stands (remember a temple is always raised) the aptly named front hall. This hall will always feature two stone lions, at least two stone pillars carved in the shape of dragons, and three to five doors, all of which serve to both welcome human visitors in and keep unwanted spirits out.

Beyond the front hall will be a series of alternating courtyards and halls aligned in a straight axis. A statue of the main temple god sits enshrined in the second hall, while adjoining rooms to the left and right – and a rear hall if there is one – contain shrines to secondary deities, Buddhas, or more mundanely, office space. The latter may seem out of place at first, but someone has to manage affairs. Most temples in Taiwan are now in fact incorporated and play a central role in community life, including influencing local and national politics.

Every Taiwanese temple is a variation on this basic outline and no two are exactly alike. Sleuthing about for the differences is one way to keep interest levels high when touring multiple sites.

 Decorative arts

Taiwanese love to beautify their temples (some might say over-decorate). In the past master craftsmen could hardly keep up with demand for fine stone and wood carvings, door paintings, glazed tile and ceramic work, and the striking jiannian, a type of 3D mosaic found on rooftops. Jiannian is unique to Taiwan, and often overlooked because of this, but when approaching any temple look up. Often the roof will be so laden with mosaic dragons, tigers, flowers and historical tableaux it will appear ready to topple over.

As with the temple layout, look for variety to sustain interest. Short pillars for example are often carved in the shape of melons, but they can also be elephants, lions, flower baskets, and even human figures bent over as if truly bearing a load.

Deities

There are 15,000 official temples around Taiwan, dedicated to hundreds of gods, folk heroes, animals, and even a pair of 17th-century Dutch Admirals. The most commonly worshipped deities include Matsu, the Empress of Heaven (and something like the patron saint of Taiwan); the Wang Ye, former plague demons now considered guardian spirits; Tudi Gong, the earth-god (and Santa Claus look-a-like); and Guanyin, not a god but the well-loved Bodhisattva of mercy.

 Rites

Avoid evil and secure good luck. Those are the basic aspirations of most temple goers. And it doesn’t matter which god is their focus, everyone performs similar acts of baibai (worship) to help get what they want.

Common offerings include food, candles, prayers, opera performances, and birthday parties. While commonplace, burning incense is among the most sublime and mystical of temple rites; ash and smoke from the main censor are believed to embody the very divine force of the resident god.

Moon blocks, found on the altar of every temple, are cast (bwah bweh) on the floor to divine the yes-no answers to personal questions. Should I take this job? marry this person? see this doctor? and can I please make more money? are all fair requests.

And how should the non-believer act during all this? Natural. No one is bothered in the least by visitors.

Worth exploring

Most of Taiwan’s best temples (defined by age, beauty and popularity with worshipers) can be found in major urban areas, or easily accessible smaller towns. They include Taipei’s Bai'An & Longshan Temples, Tainan City’s Matsu & Confucian temples, Hsinchu’s City God Temple, and Lukang’s Matsu and Longshan temples.
 

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Kinmen Island,  Taiwan

There’s nothing like decades of martial law to make a community long for the good times. For the residents of Kinmen Island, a frontline in the defence against a communist invasion of Taiwan, those were the days of handsome brick villages, a thickly forested landscape, raucous festivals to protective deities, and tens of kilometres of sandy beaches free of terrifying landmines.

However, recovery had to wait till 1995 – the year the island was turned into a national park – but the islanders have been largely successful in turning back the clock, and even giving it a good polish.

It helped that they had the heritage to work with. Take the villages. For most of the Qing Dynasty (AD 1644-1912), Kinmen had grown wealthy with trade, and clan competed with clan to display status with their homes. While a number of yanglou mansions fuse eastern and western styles, a typical dwelling is more traditionally southern Chinese in appearance: one-storey with a red-brick facade and topped with overhanging eaves. It’s a good rule of thumb that if the roof sweeps and tapers out like a dainty swallow’s tail, the family who built it was wealthy. Other decorative touches on posher homes include recessed lintels with ceramic figurines, glazed tiles, stone relief, and detailed carvings on exposed wood brackets.

Folk events, such as grand smoky festivals for the gods, have also regained momentum. Or, more accurately, funding. The ‘Welcoming the City God’ parade, a mass pilgrimage of costumed and merry-making devotees across the wooded countryside, is centuries old. But it was only two years ago that anyone outside Kinmen had heard about it (through some well-placed advertorials no less). It would be easy to write that the event is now in danger of losing its authenticity, but for a Taiwanese community, when the times are good, the festivals should be even better. And the gods themselves wouldn’t settle for anything less.

Residents are understandably less excited about the opening of former military sites such as the tunnels they used to huddle into on thrice-weekly drills (Kinmen is one of the most dug-into places in the world). But most will admit that the military presence wasn’t all bad. Idle soldiers were usually put to use maintaining roads, building parks, planting trees, landscaping and even collecting trash. And without landmines under them, Kinmen’s fine-sand beaches would surely not have remained undeveloped for so long

The island’s numerous lakes and ponds are also largely military creations. Willow-lined Lake Tai, for example, was created when a causeway had to be built across the mouth of a lagoon to facilitate tank traffic. The tanks are gone, but today the lake is a migratory bird habitat, and the daily sight of black cormorants coming to rest on the waters in the late evening has become one of Kinmen’s iconic images.

In short, the islanders are a content lot these days as they re-familiarize themselves with the tranquil routines of country life. Their absolute isolation has long ended, but with their homeland still just remote enough, touristy crowds are unlikely to ever become a second force to snatch away the peace.  

How to: Kinmen is a short flight away from most major cities in Taiwan, or an hour ferry ride from Xiamen, China. Traffic on the island is light and car, scooter and bicycle rentals are available and easily arranged through homestays in one of the old villages.

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Buying Jade in Taiwan

Valued throughout Asia for its beauty and elegance, jade is an especially desired keepsake for visitors to Taipei, which has hundreds of stores specializing in jade as well as the colossal weekend Jade Market.  As a long-time resident of Taiwan, I’ve been asked on more than one occasion to accompany visiting friends to purchase jade, always declining due to my lack of anything even approaching expertise.  So it was good fortune indeed to be invited to take a brief course in jade identification given by the gracious Roxanne Tu, Senior Gemologist at Taipei’s Museum of Jade Art.

Roxanne brings out a velvet lined box of nine jade bracelets and announces that we’ll be starting with a test.  ‘Only three of these are real jade. The others are fake. Can you tell them apart?’  The bracelets passes from hand to hand, and are held to the light, examined by five pairs of eyes.  When we have separated them, using nothing more than beginners instinct (disqualifying ones that look too real to be true, for example), Roxanne smiles. She does not tell us whether we’d chosen wisely or not. Instead, she asks us if we are ready to learn about jade.

Jade chrysanthemum at the Taipei Museum of Jade Art

‘In the jade world, we use a special machine to scan a piece, a machine that measures the spectrum of light as it goes through the jade.’ Roxanne shows us two documents of jade authenticity, each of which has contains a boxed line graph. ‘The lines represent light passing through the stones.’

One line is a smooth arc. The other a jagged line, like the edge of a steak knife.

‘The first graph, this is the spectrograph of a piece of true jade. And the second, that’s a fake. It might look pretty to the eye, but it isn’t real jade. If you are looking at a certificate belonging to a piece of jade, it is the first line that you want to see.’

‘Fair enough,’ I say, ‘but what should the casual shopper be looking for?’

Roxanne takes a second black velvet lined box out, one containing several pieces of translucent jade of different shapes, colors and sizes.  She takes one jade bangle, a light piece clearly designed for a woman quite slim of wrist, and dangles it from a string.

‘Listen,’ she says, and strikes the piece gently but firmly with a 10NT coin. The resulting sound is a light plink.  She then dangles and strikes a second bangle. The result is a dull thud. Our group voices the conclusion that the first bangle, with its lighter sound, must be the better quality one.

‘This is a common trap. The fact is that neither of these pieces is of very good quality. It isn’t the pitch you need to listen for, but the length of the sound itself. This is what real jade sounds like.’

Roxanne picks up a third bangle by its thread and strikes it. The resulting sound, while only slightly longer, resonates.

‘It’s not that the tone is high or low. It’s the last second that you want to listen for. You should be able to hear the vibration at the end.’

But not all jade bracelets resonate – only translucent jade, which comes from the water, will produce a vibrational frequency. For jade bracelets made from mountain stones, another method must be used.

Roxanne takes two similar looking bracelets, both containing varying shades of light and dark green.  She shines the light through the bracelets from behind, and as she does, the difference becomes apparent. On one, the light has caused the line between the varying shades of green to become more distinct. On the other, the place where light and dark green had merged becomes blurred, diffused by the light itself.

‘On real jade, the light will heighten the difference between the shades of green. But with fake jade, the light will only make it blurry,’ she tells us. ‘This method is useful for different articles of mountain jade, not only bracelets.’

Roxanne Tu and her son at the Taipei Museum of Jade Art

Roxanne offers other sensible tips as well. Always buy from a licensed dealer who’ll provide a certificate of authenticity. (The Jade Market, in her opinion, is best suited for trinket shopping rather than high end purchases).

Our group is now ready for our own examination. The box is brought back out, and using the methods that we’ve been taught, within a few minutes we’ve come to a collective consensus as to which three of the nine bangles are of genuinely high quality.  We don’t get them all correct, but – as the Meatloaf song goes – two out of three ain’t bad.

But before our newfound semi-expertise can go to our heads long enough to make us consider any serious purchasing, Roxanne informs us what the asking price might be for the genuine article.

‘This one, for example,’ she holds one of the dark green bracelets we’d correctly identified as real, ‘is worth around 30,000.’

‘That’s a lot,’ I say. ‘Most casual tourists aren’t going to spend 30,000 NT on a keepsake.’

‘NT? No. I mean American dollars. A real jade bracelet such as this can cost that much, or even more.’

Duly schooled in the value, complexity and precious nature of this very precious stone, we thank our teacher and exit the museum to shop for what we now know will be mere baubles at the weekend Jade Market.

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About Twain

Ilha Formosa – Beautiful Island. This is what a group of Portuguese sailors, said to have been the first Westerners to lay eyes on the island, uttered upon seeing Taiwan for the first time. We imagine they must have been pretty enamoured. While not every Westerner has the same love-at-first-sight reaction to Taiwan, our Portuguese seafaring friends were just the first of many. With the lush mountains of Wulai, pulsating cities like Taipei, the stunning basalt cliffs of  Penghu , excellent hiking in Taroko Gorge, not to mention some of the world’s best hot springs (we especially like the Tainan Hot Spring), Taiwan cuts a figure as one of the most diverse destinations in Asia.

True, Taiwan hasn’t yet made it to the top of everybody’s ‘to visit’ list, but we think this is partially a result of people not quite knowing what Taiwan has to offer. But within the borders of this small, sweet-potato-shaped island barely the size of many American states lies a world of contrasts and a melange of cultural influences you’re not likely to find anywhere else on the planet.

In the first decade of the 21st century, Taiwan is increasingly drawing travellers of all stripes: from spiritual seekers looking to experience the island’s religious heritage to gourmands in search of the perfect night-market­ meal to computer geeks scanning the horizon for the latest high-tech gadgets. Taiwan offers visitors a hypermodern skin, an ancient Chinese skeleton and an aboriginal soul. And more than that, Taiwan has some of the world’s warmest people, affable to a fault and so filled with rénqíng wèi (which, roughly translated, means ‘personal affection’) that few who come to Taiwan a stranger leave that way.

Much has changed in the centuries since the Portuguese first saw Taiwan. Still, we think if the same group of sailors came back in the present day, they’d call it Ilha Formosa all over again.

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