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 betel nut plantations and clotheslines in small-town backyards that straddle railroad tracks first built for loggers. The train, a popular attraction that brings travelers up and down the mountains, sputters through 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 train. As we coil higher toward the peak, around Z-shaped bends and through mossy tunnels, the views become desaturated until they finally fade behind a veil of cold fog held up by ancient red cypress trees whose cobra-size roots cover the ground like noodles in soup.
My journey to the mountain resort of Alishan is a two-hour slideshow of kaleidoscopic green that sums up the diversity of Taiwan—through tea plantations and high-altitude forests dotted with colorful Buddhist temples. This is a land where a traveler can go from tropical coast, through soaring mountains, to dense woodlands in under two hours—part of the appeal of exploring this eggplant-shaped nation less than half the size of Ireland. Alishan is one of my favorite stops on a road trip through the country, beginning in the capital, Taipei, in the north; continuing through some of the nine national parks full of hot springs, waterfalls, gorges, and evergreen tropical rain forest; 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, in 2012, wide-eyed on an eight-month gap-year jaunt around Asia. My guide was a girl named Etty, whom I'd first contacted via Couchsurfing and met for an innocent 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 the country's second city of 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 planning 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 one-year-old who has a Taiwanese middle name and a Dutch last name.
Visiting 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 steadfastly 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 sometimes gets misty-eyed talking about the sunrise over Yushan, Taiwan's highest peak, or the volcanic landscapes, cherry blossoms, and bubbling waterfalls of the Yangmingshan National Park, on Taipei's northern fringe. A retired forestry official, he helped found some of the country's national parks and was posted to many of its wilder corners. He'll remind us that 60 percent of the country is covered in forest, 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 mainland Chinese until it was invaded by the Japanese in 1895. The new rulers went about building railroads, tunnels, and factories, turning Taiwan 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 in Taiwan, envisioned a Confucian society with respect for the past, along with a Western-friendly form of capitalism. Even as the country emerged as one of the four Asian Tigers, the genteel culture he nurtured has endured.
I feel the Japanese influence at Jiufen, one of my first stops, a seaside town in the lush mountains east of Taipei. Its teahouses on the hillsides and lantern-lined alleyways 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 in Spirited Away, Hayao Miyazaki's surreal animated reverie. We hike upward through grassy plains to a Jenga stack of colossal boulders on top of Teapot Mountain as soft-spoken Taiwanese guide Steven Chang talks of mô-sîn-á, the tricksy folk creatures believed to cause hikers to have accidents. From the summit I look across rolling meadows to a lone octagonal pavilion on a distant jagged mountaintop, like a dragon's back plummeting into the ocean. In the valley behind me are the crumbling remnants of a Japanese 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 neighborhoods and far-flung forests, topped with spiraling multicolored dragons, phoenixes, and intricate scenes dancing from one gabled roof to another. Every feather, every scaled claw, every sun-pointing whisker is painstakingly created from smashed-up 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.
We drive to Shitoushan, 90 minutes southwest of Taipei, passing verdant rice paddies and one-street townships of shacks covered in bougainvillea, where women in tartan bucket hats hawk plump pomelos and football-size cabbages from the backs of pickup trucks. Our 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 smoldering joss sticks. The valley echoes with chirping 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 clad 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 concludes, nodding to the woman, who is now doing ballerina-like jumps of ecstasy. “She has the gift.” That night, as the sun dips behind swallowtail ridges, I am in bed by eight, lines of prayer still droning from monastery speakers.
South of Shitoushan, the Central Cross-Island Highway cuts through Taiwan's lush inland and connects the populous west with the wild east, through the peaks and gorges of the Taroko National Park, eventually arriving at the Qingshui Cliff, 13 miles of forested bluffs that plunge almost vertically into the jewel-blue Pacific. We 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. Swallows sweep in and out of cliffs that are like layered cakes of swirling marble, topped with wild jungle. Below me the Liwu River rages around mammoth boulders, as it has for millions of years.
Deeper inland, it is just us and the road, silent black tunnels opening into muffled bamboo forests or curious 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-hunting trips, and ambushes by wild macaques. One story is halted by the sound of a gunshot in the distance. “Mountain rats,” he mumbles, of the poachers who kill wild boar and muntjac, a type of deer. “But nothing compared to the head-hunting tribes who once roamed these forests.” 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 Formica tabletops, tube lights reflecting in the soup's oily film. From the kitchen comes the chack-a-chack of a ladle hitting a fiery wok; behind us, a lady sells kumquat lemonade laced with basil seeds, sold as “frog's eggs.” I spend the better part of the afternoon lolling around the lakeshore, watching bushy-tailed squirrels steal papaya from vendors, listening to a lone violin player scratching out Chinese folk tunes. When they end the only sound is the gently lapping waves.
South of the lake we stop to visit one of the region's tea plantations, which grows oolongs prized like Champagne. Between two of thousands of neat lines of shrubs, we meet a troupe of tea pluckers in traditional hats draped with colorful Hello Kitty-emblazoned cloths. A man in his 50s with a tar-black betel nut smile waves us closer, showing me a razor blade taped to his gloved index finger. “We harvest all our tea by hand,” he tells me. “None of that machine stuff. Only the freshest leaves, the highest quality.”
Heading south, a different Taiwan emerges, one I remember from my first journey, though the memories have become hazy as an old photo. The dialects are trickier than the crisp Mandarin up north, the food sweeter. Everywhere seems to bathe in a permanent golden glow. We stop at a giant fiberglass pineapple, manned by a chirpy woman in a frayed straw hat and rubber boots. “I've never seen foreigners stop here before,” she says as she hands me a slice of pineapple. I can barely finish one tongue-tingling slice 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 next morning we 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 hostels on the main strip. Wrinkled shopkeepers bask on front porches. 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. “When I first saw this place, the colors just hit me,” he says. “It's kinda like a little Hawaii, with its own rhythm.” Mark was a regular at the Dulan Sugar Factory, an old Japanese space where locals would cram in to listen to Taiwanese punk and indie rock among pop-ups selling driftwood handicrafts. The Six Senses group is rumored to be opening a resort in the nearby mountains dotted with hot springs. “It's not going to stay like this forever,” Mark says, shrugging.
Nothing ever does. But, sitting on the black sand beach east of Dulan, watching the surfers who have clambered through sweetsop plantations to paddle out to the roiling swells, I feel that happy sense of otherness I felt 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.
Where to stay
The new arrival: Hoshinoya Guguan
Japanese brand Hoshinoya, which specializes in deep-nature minimalism, opened its first Taiwan outpost in the tiny hot-spring enclave of Guguan last summer, surrounded by 10,000-foot-tall mountains. The property, all bamboo forest and right angles, has 50 rooms, each with its own mountain-fed onsen. The restaurant serves excellent kaiseki-style meals in which Japanese cooking techniques marry local produce like forest mushrooms. Doubles from about $600
The high-design hot spring hideaway: Villa 32
This five-suite boutique stay is the standout in the cluster of hotels surrounding the Beitou hot springs in the lush Yangmingshan National Park, north of Taipei. Well-heeled locals relax in its sulfurous thermal baths, on the pleasant side of very hot. Overnight guests can choose between marble-clad Western suites or Japanese tatami ones—both are sleek, straight-lined affairs, with white-glove service to match. Doubles from $550
The time-tested classic: The Lalu
Occupying a hillside with Sun Moon Lake's most striking vantage point, the Lalu has grown from a private presidential hangout in the 1950s to one of Taiwan's most revered luxury hotels. The late Kerry Hill spearheaded its renovation in 2002, and the basalt stone walls and teakwood lattices still impress. The lakeside lap pool is one of the best spots for a post-hike dip, while the balcony daybeds adjoining every room are a great place for sundowners. Doubles from $420
Remote Lands runs seven-night trips around Taiwan, from $750 per person per day, based on double occupancy.
