After spending 6 or so weeks in the Middle East, I headed to East Asia for the next leg of the trip. First stop, Phuket Thailand! I only spent 6 days in Phuket and spent most of my time there chilling on the beach and eating delicious Thai food. I also spent a day playing golf at the Phuket country club, which was fun. Phuket was great, amazing food, good beaches and a very lively nightlife. With that being said, given how far behind this blog is, I’m going to skip making a dedicated post about it and move right along to my next action packed adventure, Taiwan! Taiwan was not really a country I knew much about, but was excited about it because both culturally and geographically, it was as close as I was going to get to China on this trip. China is high on my list of places I’d like to visit, but as of last January they were still on lockdown and very strict about covid procedures, which was not something I was looking to regress back into on this adventure.
I flew into Taipei right before Christmas and met up with my friend Mags who I met during the year I spent in India in 2019. She was on a little SE Asia tour of her own and it was great to spend a few days with her. We spent a few days touring the major sites in Taipei. We went to the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, the Longshan Temple, and spent an afternoon soaking in the hot springs at Beitou. The hot springs are unique in that they are located right in the city. There was also some really great street art in Taipei, which has become a passion of mine to seek out in each city I visit. One major highlight of Taipei was climbing Elephant Mountain for the sunset one night. Elephant Mountain overlooks the city and provides an incredible view of the Taipei 101, which was the tallest building in the world when it was built and held that designation from 2004 until the completion of the Burj Khalifa in 2010. It’s a really cool skyscraper that was designed to look like a bamboo tree. The views over the city as the sun set and shifted to nightfall with all the city lights below were incredible. The pictures (which you can find below) look like a zoom background.
Another major highlight of Taiwan was the night market scene. Taiwan is well known for their night markets and it surely didn’t disappoint on that front. There is actually a Michelin star guide they put out on the best food stalls at the Taipei night markets and I did my best to hit as many of those stands as possible. I ate at them nearly every night in Taiwan. I love night markets because you can try small bites of so many different types of food at a really cheap price, including all the weird stuff of course. After all, eating the weirdest foods at every destination is a core mission of this whole journey. I ate smoked duck head/neck, chicken feet, the infamous stinky tofu, taiwanese oyster omelettes, flying fish roe sausages, fish cakes, lots of dim sum dumplings, black pepper pork buns, crab, squid, octopus, ramen dishes, the list goes on and on. I’ve got to admit, I don’t understand the hype around stinky tofu. If you’ve ever been around it, you know what it is, because it smells awful. Like the strongest bleu cheese stench you could imagine. I love Bleu cheese and most fermented foods in general, so I assumed I would like it, but it literally tastes like nothing. Like if I am going to go through the suffering of eating something that smells like sweaty gym socks that have been balled up in a locker for months, it better have a nice flavor to it. Otherwise I’d just eat white bread or something just as boring. I actually tried it from 3 different food stalls, assuming I’d just gotten a bad batch or something but every time I came away unsatisfied with shitty smelling breath. Oh and I can’t forget to call out the Taiwanese hotdogs, which were amazing. Their name literally translated to “small sausage inside large sausage” and they consisted of a smaller pork sausage which was wrapped inside of a larger sticky rice sausage and then topped with pickled vegetables, wasabi, basil, sweet chili sauce , garlic and powdered peanuts. Very different from any hotdog I’ve ever had, but they were so tasty. I’d put the Taiwanese dog up against a Chicago dog any day.
We also stumbled upon this random bar one night that was owned by one of the most fascinating guys I’ve met on the whole trip. He was actually a Taiwanese American who basically ran away from home at 16 and got in with the wrong crowd and ended up being a main lieutenant of a major cartel boss and told us the most insane stories about running guns, drugs and money all over the world. I can’t actually verify anything he told me, but he claimed to have been to 175 countries, mostly illegally by way of helicopter or by small fishing boats packed with contraband. It would take one hell of an imagination to come up with some of these stories to impress some random American traveller dude in your bar. We really hit it off with him and he let us stay after he locked up and we ended up sitting there chatting and drinking with him with him until the sun came up. Very memorable and random night. Anyway, he had since cleaned up his act, gotten out of the cartel and opened this bar in Taipei. I’m not going to mention the name on here because I don’t know who the hell reads this thing, but if you’re in Taipei and looking for a very interesting night out, hit me up and I’ll tell you.
A few days into my trip to Taiwan, I met a new friend, Sharu who was also coincidentally from India and had recently moved to Taiwan for work. We hit it off right away and she was planning to go down the east coast to Hualien for the weekend, and invited me to tag along. Hualien is home to the Taroko gorge, which contains what is considered to be the grand canyon of Taiwan. We spent our first day there biking around the coastline of the city and then booked a tour of the national park for the next day. I’m not going to lie, I didn’t have big expectations for “the Grand Canyon of Taiwan”. I had never heard of the Taroko gorge and just assumed, given how small of an island Taiwan is that it probably wasn’t that impressive. I liked the idea of getting out of the city and into nature for a couple days though. Well, I massively underestimated this park, it was sooo damn cool. The gorge was massive and honestly I couldn’t believe I’d never heard of it before, apparently Taiwan needs some better marketing. The tour lasted all day and the bus dropped us off at multiple points where we could hike along the gorge. I’ll let the pictures below speak for themselves, but it was absolutely gorgeous.
The day after Christmas, I flew to Seoul for what I thought was going to be a weeklong trip. What I failed to consider was the difference in the weather in Seoul. I’ll write a separate blog about that, but let’s suffice it to say that there is nothing “south” about South Korea in January. It’s cold as hell and I didn’t pack clothes for those type of conditions. So, I ended up cutting my Seoul trip short and headed back to Taipei for 4 more days to celebrate New Years with my friend Sharu. We spent New Years eve at the Taipei 101, where they put on one hell of a firework show. The firework launchers were literally attached to the skyscraper and it was one of the more unique fireworks displays I’ve ever seen. After New years, I spent 3 more days in Taipei which were filled with exploring more neighborhoods and eating at more great night markets.
Overall, I really loved Taiwan. It was one of those countries that wasn’t even on my radar going into the trip. Those tend to be some of my favorite places, the ones you have zero expectations for going in and you depart wondering why you don’t hear more people talk about them. The only reason I went was to meet up with my friend, but it was really awesome. Great public transportation, very clean, 711/family mart convenience stores on every block, everything was reasonably priced, with both a world class city and amazing nature just a couple hour train ride apart. One more fun tidbit about the cleanliness before I wrap this up. One thing I couldn’t figure out in Taiwan was that everything was so clean, yet you couldn’t find a public trash can anywhere. I talked to a local about this and he explained to me that they used to have trash cans but the government did a study and determined that filth tends to collect around trash cans, so they got rid of them. My response was- hmmm that makes sense, but that would never fly in America, everyone would just throw their trash on the ground 😂. I found that this was very common in Korea and Japan as well as my journey progressed. At the end of the day, not the biggest deal, but if you visit any of these places, bring some big pockets and prepare to carry your trash around with you all day. One other interesting thing I found all over Taipei were these claw machine arcades that were filled with claw machines that contained all sorts of random things. Some of them contained stuffed animals, like you see in the US, but there were also lots of them filled with regular household goods such as laundry detergent, toilet paper, diapers, dish soap, etc which was pretty hilarious. Apparently if you’re good at claw machines, you can save yourself a pretty penny off your grocery bill in Taipei. That pretty much wraps up my doubleheader in Taiwan. Stay tuned for my next blog on South Korea!
