Taiwan Travel Guides: Cultural Tourism

Taiwan is one of those places that somehow gets treated like a layover while quietly sitting there with mountains, temples, night markets, hot springs, ridiculous food and enough weird shit to fill an entire trip.

Which seems like a marketing failure.

Taipei is the obvious starting point. Taipei 101 dominates the skyline, the metro actually works, convenience stores are everywhere, and night markets turn eating dinner into a competitive sport involving absolutely no coherent meal plan.

Just point at things.

You’ll probably be fine.

Then get out of Taipei, because Taiwan becomes considerably weirder.

Jiufen climbs a mountainside through narrow alleys packed with food, tea houses and approximately the entire population of Earth. Nearby, the abandoned Shuinandong refinery looks like civilization simply stopped paying the electricity bill and walked away. Keep exploring and you’ll find dramatic coastlines, waterfalls, mountain roads, temples, hot springs and geological landscapes that make the island feel much larger than it actually is.

Taiwan is also refreshingly easy to travel. Trains work. Public transportation is excellent. Food is affordable. People are generally helpful, even when the language barrier turns your interaction into an elaborate international game of charades.

The weather, however, occasionally chooses violence. Summers are aggressively humid, typhoons exist, and mountain weather can rewrite your itinerary without requesting permission.

But Taiwan is remarkably good at rewarding curiosity.

It’s modern, traditional, beautiful, strange, delicious and criminally underrated.

Come for Taipei.

Stay because you accidentally found an abandoned industrial complex in the mountains and suddenly that’s the best part of your fucking trip.

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Latest Cultural Tourism Destinations in Taiwan

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