With a toot of its horn and a metallic screech, the Alishan Forest Railway rumbles out of Chiayi, a midsize city in southern Taiwan. As the humid jumble of roaring motorcycles and bubble-tea shops vanishes behind me, knotted electrical wires make way for betelnut plantations and small-town back gardens that straddle railroad tracks first built for loggers. The train, a popular attraction that brings people up and down the mountains, sputters past rice paddies and citrus orchards so close I can almost reach out and nab the fruits from my window. Bamboo and sugar palms tickle the sides of the carriage. As the ride coils higher towards the peak, around zig-zag bends, the views fade behind a veil of fog held up by ancient red cypress trees whose cobra-size roots cover the ground like noodles.
My journey to the mountain retreat of Alishan is a slideshow of kaleidoscopic green that sums up the diversity of Taiwan, via tea estates and high-altitude forests dotted with Buddhist temples. It is a land where travellers can go from tropical coast to dense woodland in under two hours – part of the appeal of this aubergine shaped nation less than half the size of Ireland. Alishan is one of my favourite stops on a road trip through the country, beginning in the capital, Taipei, in the north; continuing past some of the nine national parks full of hot springs; over cloud-shrouded mountaintops; and on to the surf and crystalline beaches of the far south.
Taiwan has been close to my heart since I first came here in 2012 on a gap-year jaunt around Asia. My guide was a young woman named Etty, who I’d first contacted via Couchsurfing and met for a coffee in Bangkok to share travel tips (she was planning to visit my home country of the Netherlands). We happened to be in Taiwan at the same time, and I ended up meeting her parents in Taichung – a town of skyscrapers and steaming, neon-glowing night markets – because that’s what happens in a place where family is everything.
We crisscrossed the Taroko National Park on a scooter and were soon mapping out trips through Japan, Cambodia and Sri Lanka, while it dawned on us that this was more than a holiday fling. We moved back to Bangkok together and are now married with a two year-old who has a Taiwanese middle name and a Dutch last name. Returning to Taichung two or three times a year, I’ve come to see it through my wife’s eyes – as a home of sorts, a place for crammed dinner tables and kaoliang toasts to Popo, Etty’s late grandmother, who refused to believe I wasn’t American. Over Auntie Chao’s beef noodle soup, which she makes like clockwork every two weeks, my father-in-law gets misty-eyed talking about the sunrise over Yushan, Taiwan’s highest peak, or the volcanic landscapes, cherry blossoms and bubbling falls of the Yangmingshan National Park, on Taipei’s northern fringe. A retired forestry official, he’ll remind us that 60 per cent of the land is covered in woodland, and that it was for good reason that Portuguese sailors christened it Ilha Formosa, or Beautiful Island, when they washed up here in the 16th century.
Taiwan was variously held by the Dutch, Spanish and Chinese until it was invaded by the Japanese in 1895. The new rulers went about building railroads, tunnels and factories, turning the country into a supplier for Japan’s booming industry until they were ousted after World War II. Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese Nationalist leader who fled the newly Communist mainland in 1949 to set up a stronghold here, envisioned a Confucian society with respect for the past, along with a Western-friendly form of capitalism. Even as the nation emerged as one of the four Asian Tiger economic powerhouses, the culture he nurtured has endured.
I feel Japan’s influence at Jiufen, one of my first stops, a seaside town in the lush mountains east of Taipei. Its hillside teahouses and lantern-lined alleys were mostly built by Japanese gold-seekers in the late 19th century. Today, the majority of visitors are still Japanese, though they largely come because Jiufen inspired the setting of Spirited Away, Hayao Miyazaki’s surreal animated reverie. I trek upwards through grassy plains to a Jenga stack of colossal boulders on top of Teapot Mountain as local guide Steven Chang talks of mô-sîn-á, the tricksy mythic creatures believed to cause accidents for hikers. From the summit I see a lone octagonal pavilion on a distant jagged peak, like a stegosaurus’s back plummeting into the ocean.
In the valley behind me are the remnants of a Shinto shrine; beyond, the deep-blue nothingness of the East China Sea. Wherever you are in Taiwan, temples are never far. Their crowns jut from suburban neighbourhoods and far-flung woods, topped with spiralling multicoloured dragons, phoenixes and intricate scenes dancing from one gabled roof to another. Every feather, scale, claw and whisker is painstakingly created from smashed plates and tiles, an ancient southern Chinese craft that has withered on the mainland in tandem with religion. In Taiwan, Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity and curious folk customs have flourished together I drive to Shitoushan, 90 minutes south-west of Taipei, passing verdant rice paddies and one-street townships of shacks covered in bougainvillaea, where women in tartan bucket hats hawk plump pomelos and football-size cabbages from the backs of pick-up trucks. My home that night is the Taoist Quanhua Temple, a sprawling mess of staircases, pagodas and ceramic cranes built into a sandstone cliff face. I step onto my balcony to find the sky a shade of gold, the air sweetly fragrant from smouldering joss sticks. The valley echoes with crickets and the mumbling of prayer, interrupted only by the occasional clang of a gong.
Somewhere in the distance, I hear a wail. Leaving the temple to trace its source, I discover a little shrine half embedded in a cave up the hill. Another scream. A woman in a pink tracksuit is having a crying fit in front of the altar. A short man with salt-and-pepper hair joins me and begins a yarn about ‘minds, bodies and souls’ that I fail to fully grasp. Finally, I glean that the woman is hearing otherworldly voices. ‘It’s the language of gods,’ the man says, nodding to her as she jumps in ecstasy. ‘She has the gift.’ That night, as the sun dips behind swallowtail ridges, I am in bed by 8pm, lines of prayer still droning from monastery speakers South of Shitoushan, the Central Cross-Island Highway connects the populous west with the rugged east, through the ravines of the Taroko National Park, eventually arriving at the Qingshui Cliff, 13 miles of wooded bluffs that plunge almost vertically into the blue Pacific. I stop at the Tunnel of Nine Turns viewpoint, where Korean, Thai and Japanese voices mingle with the hypnotic gurgle of waterfalls feeding into the gorge from thousands of feet above.
Below me the Liwu River rages as it has for millions of years. Deeper inland, silent black tunnels open into bamboo forests and villages smothered in moss. Mr Wang, the driver for this section of the trip, occasionally breaks the silence to talk of Formosan black bear encounters, boar-tracking adventures and ambushes by macaques. One story is halted by a distant gunshot. ‘Mountain rats,’ he says, of the poachers who kill wild muntjac deer. ‘But nothing compared to the head-hunting tribes who once roamed these parts.’ Beer cans, cigarettes and areca nuts wrapped in betel leaves are laid on crumbling roadside walls, folksy cries for good fortune. As we rise and the pressure increases on our eardrums, needles replace tropical foliage. Conifer-covered peaks huddle like giants with hairy backs. The road finally reaches Sun Moon Lake, Taiwan’s largest body of water. We pull into a nondescript restaurant to eat beef noodles at circular tabletops. From the kitchen comes the chacka-chack of a ladle hitting a fiery wok; behind us, a woman sells kumquat lemonade laced with basil seeds, sold as ‘frog’s eggs’. I spend the afternoon lolling on the shore, watching squirrels steal papayas from vendors, listening to a violin player scratching out old Chinese tunes. When they end the only sound is the gently lapping waves.
My next stop is one of the region’s tea plantations, which grows oolong as prized as Champagne. Between two of the thousands of neat lines of shrubs, I meet a troupe of tea pluckers in traditional hats draped with Hello Kitty-emblazoned cloths. A man in his 50s with a tar-black smile waves, showing me a razor blade taped to his gloved index finger. ‘We harvest by hand,’ he tells me. ‘None of that machine stuff. Only the freshest leaves, the highest quality.’ As I head south, a different Taiwan emerges, one I remember from my first journey. The dialects are trickier than the crisp Mandarin up north, the food sweeter. I stop at a giant fibreglass pineapple manned by a chirpy woman in rubber boots. ‘I’ve never seen foreigners stop here before,’ she says as she hands me a slice of fruit. I can barely finish one tongue-tingling mouthful before another is in my hand; as we try to pull away, she rushes out with three bottles of pineapple juice. Anyone who has ever visited Taiwan, or met my mother-in-law, knows that this is typical in a country where ‘Have you eaten yet?’ is everyone’s first question.
The following morning I arrive in Dulan, a surf town three-and-a-half hours south of Taroko where windswept palms fill the plains between the sea and mountains. Mom-and-pop shops alternate with surf schools and hippieish guesthouses on the main strip. At the WaGaLiGong hostel, where psychedelic murals cover the tiled façade, I meet co-owner Mark Jackson, a surfer from Durban, South Africa, who arrived 17 years ago on his 50cc scooter. ‘This place is like a little Hawaii, with its own rhythm,’ he says. Jackson was a regular at the Dulan Sugar Factory, an old space built during Japanese rule where locals would cram in to listen to punk and indie rock among pop-ups selling handicrafts. The Six Senses group is rumoured to be opening a retreat in the nearby mountains dotted with hot springs. ‘It’s not going to stay this way forever,’ says Jackson. Nothing ever does. But, sitting on the black-sand beach east of Dulan, watching the wave riders who have clambered through sweetsop farms to paddle out to the roiling swells, I feel that happy sense of otherness I experienced during my first trips here. Taiwan still feels different from the rest of Asia. It may have become a home of sorts, but it remains somewhere else entirely.
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