We had accidentally timed our trip to coincide with tomb-sweeping weekend, when good Taiwanese go to their ancestors’ graves in the countryside and maintain them. Taiwan has about the best public transport network I’ve ever experienced, but it was likely to be packed completely solid, and we needed to get to Tainan, halfway across the country. HSR (bullet train) tickets with seat reservations had sold out well in advance; they always have several unreserved coaches, but it’s first-come-first-served onto the train, so we were expecting a fair bit of queueing on platforms. However, we took a punt at a ticket machine while in the station to lock up our bags, and managed to nab two seats on a perfectly timed train that evening! On top of managing (mainly through luck and Fran’s diligence) to get tickets for the Alishan forest railway (more anon, but tickets sell out instantly online and you have to be fortunate to catch the trickle of cancellations) we were rather chuffed; everything was coming up Milhouse.

The weather had turned blindingly sunny, and we quickly realised the covered passages lining every street weren’t just helpful during the rain. Left with a fairly free morning we had a bimble through the back streets to Dihua Street, reputed to be the oldest street in Taipei: there are records of it during Dutch occupation (mid-17th century) and was a commercial hub in Qing days (mid-19th) but almost all its architecture dates from Japanese occupation or later and is fascinating: local Taiwanese materials employed for a Japanese spec aping European fashions. The use hasn’t changed much, either, some trading on their history to be trendy bars and bookshops but most laying out vast quantities of the usual tea, grilled snacks, traditional medicine, fabrics, calligraphy paraphernalia, and dried ingredients in big bags. This was honestly the street that felt most quintessentially “Chinese” to me, although it may just have been that it smelled quite a lot like Chinatown back home.

The time came to ride the red line to Taipei 101, the city’s signature building, a postmodern classic like a green glass pagoda half a kilometre tall. 101 absolutely dominates the Taipei skyline, many times taller and bulkier than any other building in Taipei, which is fine because it’s also a very stylish and interesting building.* It’s also immensely strongly built (being basically right next to a fault line, in a country which gets some very serious tropical storms) and form follows function attractively, especially with the famous mass damper. The eight main segments each have eight floors (eight being a lucky number), several of the uppermost layers being an observation deck, which was where we were headed.

The better weather and the public holiday had left 101 absolutely packed. Trying to decide yesterday between the cheap regular Observatory ticket and the very expensive Skyline 460 (everything in between looked pointless), we had gone for the latter, an open-air experience which gets you clipped to the very top of the human-habitable floors of the building, the only thing above you a mast. Three lifts later (ears popping seven times in the first, which claims to be the fastest lift in the world) we got into our harnesses, accepted little cords and clear bags with lanyards to stop us losing our glasses and phones to the wind, clipped onto a rail and had a fantastic half-hour or so looking down on Taipei from a very great height indeed. The sky had turned a bit overcast but there was still plenty of light shining on the northern districts, and a dramatic haze in the distance as more clouds rolled in from the south. It wasn’t, in truth, even that windy.

The lower decks are full of fake plants and various forms of Instagram-optimised noise, much of it featuring the tower’s mascot, the bizarre-looking “Damper Baby”, with an abdomen shaped like the building’s mass damper and eyes and a mouth resembling the numbers 101. The mass damper itself, a 6-metre-diameter scalloped golden ball, is however a truly delightful example of form and function and has become a popular local icon, which is a weird thing to say about a 660-tonne steel weight. We collected our Skyline gifts (you get a mug and a free bubble tea) and commemorative photos, chilled for a while in one of the lower observatory levels, and descended to a now totally packed lobby; a shrill announcer voice told everyone in the lobby that it was currently a two hour wait to go up on the cheap tickets, at which three Americans – standing very much in the way of everyone else – gave up.

We wolfed an early dinner at “Selfish Burger” (pistachio burger!), managed the bewildering labyrinth of Taipei Main Station to the HSR platform, where (much like the metro trains) the correct places to wait to board each part of each carriage were clearly painted out on the platform. This works very well, and the train was zipping away south almost immediately.  As the sun set over a very swiftly moving Taiwan landscape, I was struck by the observation that this would be absolutely atrocious countryside to invade: randomly shaped muddy paddy-fields everywhere with all the roads on narrow exposed berms between them, loads of serious rivers, loads of little hills and woods covered in evergreen foliage, and small multi-storey buildings absolutely everywhere – and those are the easy bits, the bits that aren’t incredibly dense complex urban terrain, or mountains. A resourced and motivated defence would make taking every kilometre of this country a bloodbath. I really hope the PRC never decide it’s worth it.

Tainan, 300km and a couple of hours later; the HSR stations outside of Taipei are all built some way outside their towns, TGV-style, and although there was a shuttlebus we struggled to find it and got a cab instead to our hotel (with a Japanese-style hip bath and a fun old wood-panelled bedroom.) Out for dinner at 阿蓮牛肉湯 – “A-Lian Beef Soup” (the fourth character, which looks a bit like two bits of meat in an oven, is “meat”), a fantastic example of the informal Taiwanese eatery in what felt like an old garage, with tables made of vintage sewing machine legs (“I really want to get a picture of the Singer over there but I don’t want that woman to think I’m trying to photograph her feet”) and a simmering vat of beef next to the sticky rice, both all-you-can-eat alongside our incredibly tasty fresh beef soup and vegetables; there was a big touchscreen for futuristic ordering, but a very helpful waitress instead guided us across the usual laminated menu to a delightful and comprehensive dinner, and we rolled home satisfied in the dark.

 

 

Taiwan 2025
Jiufen and Houtong / Taipei Museums / Taroko Gorge / National Palace, Lungshan Temple / A Brief Interlude on the History of Taiwan / CKS Memorial and Maokong / Dihua Street, Taipei 101 / Anping District and Forts of Tainan / Tainan History / Fenqihu / Alishan

 

_{* I actually quite like skyscrapers, even modern ones, if they have any charisma – most of London’s meaningless plate-glass polygons do not pass muster, but I enjoy the Burj Khalifa, 1WTC and that Shanghai thing that looks like a bottle opener.}