Taiwan occupies an unusual position in the geography of Asian travel: consistently cited by people who have been there as one of the most rewarding destinations in the region, and consistently underrepresented in the itineraries of people who haven't. The reasons are partly logistical (fewer direct flights from Europe and North America than Japan or Thailand), partly perceptual (Taiwan reads on maps as a small island, which undersells the actual scale of experience), and partly the result of China's complex relationship with Taiwanese tourism that affected connectivity through the 2010s.
The practical situation in 2026: Taiwan has excellent public transport, is safe by any global standard, has a food scene that challenges Tokyo in quality-per-dollar, and has mountain terrain that most people planning an Asia trip don't know exists. The barriers to visiting are lower than they appear.
Taipei: The City That Works
Taipei is a city of 2.6 million in a basin surrounded by mountains, organised around an extremely efficient metro system (the MRT), a dense network of night markets, and a cultural inheritance that is specifically Taiwanese: the combination of Hokkien, Hakka, Japanese colonial, and mainland Chinese traditions that arrived in waves across three centuries and produced a visual and culinary culture distinct from all of them.
The Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in the city centre is the most contested monument in Taiwan: a 70-metre neoclassical gate facing a park where Taiwanese of several political persuasions have protested, demonstrated, and camped at various points since the 1990s. The changing of the guard ceremony inside, performed by the Republic of China military on a one-hour rotation, is careful in the way of high-formality military ritual everywhere. The monument's history (built to commemorate the ROC's founding president after his 1975 death, contested since democratisation) makes it a more interesting building than most capitals' central monuments, precisely because its meaning is still being argued over.
Jiufen, forty minutes northeast of Taipei by bus, is the hill village that inspired the aesthetic of Spirited Away: Miyazaki Hayao has denied the specific inspiration (he's from a different Japan-Taiwan exchange) but the visual match between Jiufen's teahouse staircases, red lanterns, and mountain-sea panorama and Yubaba's bathhouse is sufficiently exact that the connection has become part of the town's identity. The correct time to visit is a weekday afternoon; the weekend influx from Taipei is significant. The teahouses on the upper staircase, specifically those with sea-facing windows, serve oolong from the surrounding mountain gardens.
The Raohe Street Night Market, in Songshan district, is the oldest and most curated of Taipei's night markets: smaller and less chaotic than Shilin, its stalls more focused on a specific set of excellent dishes: the pepper buns from the front stall (baked in a tandoor-style clay oven, pork filling with spring onion, sold at around NT$55), the peanut ice-cream crepes, the braised pork rice that costs NT$30 and comes in a bowl the size of a generous fist. Night markets in Taiwan are primarily for eating rather than shopping; Raohe understands this better than the more famous alternatives.
The East Coast: Taroko and the Rift Valley
Taiwan's east coast is the part of the country that most visitors who confine themselves to Taipei entirely miss. The island's central mountain range, peaks exceeding 3,000 metres along most of its 350-kilometre length, drops directly to the Pacific on the east coast, producing a landscape that has no equivalent in Southeast Asia: vertical marble gorge, Pacific surf, rice paddies on a narrow coastal plain between the cliffs and the sea.
Taroko Gorge, in Hualien County, is Taiwan's most visited natural landmark: a 19-kilometre marble gorge through which the Liwu River runs, the walls close enough in places to touch from the road on both sides. The highway through the gorge (the Suhua Highway, completed by the ROC Army using Japanese colonial-era infrastructure in the 1950s) is Taiwan's engineering centrepiece and the reason the gorge is accessible. The trails that branch off the highway (Shakadang Trail, the Tunnel of Nine Turns, the Baiyang Waterfall trail (ending in a cave behind a waterfall)) require walking rather than driving. The walk to Baiyang Waterfall, forty minutes in from the highway, ends in a cave where the waterfall sprays across the cave entrance; in the right season, the water curtain effect is complete.
The Hualien-Taitung Rift Valley, running 180 kilometres south from Hualien City, is agricultural Taiwan in its most concentrated form: a valley between the central range and the Coastal Range, intensively farmed in rice and organic vegetables by indigenous Amis communities, the mountains visible on both sides for the entire length. The cycling route along the valley floor (the New Cycling Route, opened 2012) is 180 kilometres of separated cycle path through this landscape, manageable in three days with accommodation in the small towns along the route. Bikes are available in Hualien City; trains carry bikes in dedicated carriages.
Sun Moon Lake and the Central Highlands
Sun Moon Lake, in Nantou County at 762 metres, is the Taiwan that Japanese tourists, who visit Taiwan in large numbers, typically prioritise over the east coast. The lake (sun-shaped in its eastern half, moon-shaped in its western) was a sacred site of the Thao indigenous people before Japanese colonial-era dam construction in 1934 raised the water level and created the present form. The cycling route around the lake perimeter (33 kilometres) is the standard approach; the Formosan Aboriginal Culture Village adjacent to the lake is the theme-park version of indigenous culture that the actual Thao communities in the lakeside village of Yuchi are not.
Alishan, at 2,216 metres, is the mountain railway and forest that colonial Japan built into Taiwan's central range. The Alishan Forest Railway (1912) runs in narrow gauge from Chiayi City to the summit in ninety minutes through cypress and red cedar forest; the rack-and-pinion section above 1,000 metres is a piece of early 20th-century engineering that the railway enthusiasts who ride it are correct to regard as significant. The sunrise from Alishan over the sea of clouds below (the mountain summits of the central range emerging above a cloud layer at 1,800 metres, the Jade Mountain (Yushan, 3,952 metres, the highest in northeast Asia) visible to the north) is the experience. Arrive the night before. The sunrise bus from Alishan village to the Zhushan viewpoint departs at 4:30am.
Tainan: The Oldest City
Tainan, in southern Taiwan, was the island's capital from 1662 to 1887: the city the Dutch East India Company built (Fort Zeelandia, 1624), the city Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga) captured to expel the Dutch and establish the Tungning Kingdom, the city that the Qing dynasty governed as Taiwan's administrative centre for two centuries. The Dutch fort, the Qing-era temples, the Japanese colonial administrative buildings, and the contemporary city streets are all still present, the layers visible in the street plan.
Tainan is also, by consensus of the people who eat their way across Taiwan, where the food is best. The specific claims are consistent: the beef soup (raw beef in a clear broth from the city's Tainan-breed cattle, eaten for breakfast), the oyster omelette, the coffin bread (thick toast cut open and filled with cream soup), the dan zai noodles originated in Tainan in 1895 and spread from there. The morning markets, operating from 5am around the Nanmen Road area, are the correct approach before the temple visits. Tainan is two and a half hours from Taipei by high-speed rail (THSR): feasible as an overnight extension to a Taipei-based trip, better as a two-night stay.
