The Funny Thing about Taiwan

5 days ago
5 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

"Taiwan is one of the great cycling countries. Ask the people who live there where you should ride, and they will send you somewhere magnificent. They will also, without quite meaning to, send you somewhere most travellers could never manage. That is the funny thing about Taiwan, and it taught us a lot."

March 2023, and a Man named Liang

March 2023 was when we first set foot in Taiwan as a Tour Guide. It was also the first time we worked with Liang, who is now Our Country Manager in Taiwan. We had guests who wanted to cycle Taiwan, but we were new to the territory, so we did the most sensible thing and asked the person who knew it best.

Liang, "where is the best place to cycle in Taiwan?"

It is a simple question. The answer turned out to be more interesting than we expected. We could have skipped it, of course. We could have pulled a route off the internet and hoped for the best. But guessing is how you quietly ruin someone's holiday, and we would always rather ask the person who knows and get it right the first time.

Asked a Local, and the Answer is Hualien

Taiwan is a country of cyclists. There are seasoned road riders who take on the round-island route, a roughly nine-day loop of the entire island covering close to a thousand kilometres. These are serious people on serious bikes. And when you ask a local triathlete where the nicest route is, the answer comes back almost every time.

Hualien.

They are not wrong. Hualien is a premier cycling destination for good reason. It has dramatic coastal views, access to world-class mountain climbs, and quiet inland valleys that feel a world away from any city.

The mountain, in particular, carries a near-mythical status. Every autumn the Taiwan KOM Challenge draws professional riders from around the world to race from the coast to the clouds in a single morning. To a Taiwanese cyclist, pointing a visitor towards Hualien is close to the highest compliment they can pay. It is where they would most want to ride themselves.

The East Rift Valley gives you flat, open, peaceful riding between towering mountain ranges and bright green rice paddies. The Hualien coastal bikeway runs for about 15km of gentle, dedicated path along the Pacific, linking Qixingtan Beach and the local fishing harbour. And then there is the mountain. Hualien sits at sea level at the foot of the climb up to Wuling Pass at 3,275 metres, often called the longest continuous paved road climb in the world, and the route of the famous Taiwan KOM Challenge.

Tour Participants in Hualien Rice paddies field

The Funny Thing

Here is where the local's answer needs a gentle asterisk. It is a wonderful answer, but it assumes that you are a strong rider, comfortable on long slopes. Taroko Gorge, for all its beauty, is a steady climb that goes up for kilometre after kilometre without much of a break. This is not something you can step off a plane and simply do.

A local triathlete forgets that, in the nicest possible way, because for them it is normal. For a visitor who has trained on the flat, it is a very different proposition. The scenery is the reward. The climb is the price, and it is a steep one.

It is an easy thing to get wrong, and getting it wrong is costly. A rider who is talked onto a climb beyond them does not have a better holiday for the suffering. They have a worse one, and often a shorter one. So part of our job is to hear what a local means, translate it for the person actually sitting on the bike, and build a day that delivers the wonder without the ordeal.

Our First Tour, and a group who knew what they liked

As it happened, our first Taiwan tour was ridden by a group of ladies who thoroughly dislike long climbs and thoroughly love a good scenic photo spots. They knew exactly what they had come for, and it was not a mountain time trial.

So we did what we do best. With two support vehicles on hand, we rode the parts that were a joy to ride, and we sighed happily and rolled past the parts that were not. Nobody was left grinding up a slope they had not signed up for. Everyone went to gorge, the coast and the valley in the way they wanted them, with the camera out and the coffee close by. Taroko is astonishing, whether you can climb every metre or ride the best of it and let the van do the rest.

There were moments of quiet comedy in it too. A photo stop that ran to half an hour because the light was simply too good to leave. A coffee break that slowly turned into lunch. We learned that for this group, the stops were not interruptions to the ride. They were the ride, and the cycling was the lovely thread that joined them together.

Taiwan is far bigger than its hardest climb

Since that first trip we have kept us exploring, and Taiwan has kept rewarding us. We have found so many other lovely trails, and are grateful many of them are flat. Taoyuan and its green country lanes. Hsinchu with its lake and its coast. Lastly, Yilan. Even the heart of Taipei City itself is a pleasure on a Brompton.

Each of those places suits a different mood. A gentle, family-paced afternoon. A peaceful lake loop. A run along the coast with the wind at your back. Taiwan, it turns out, has a version of a good cycling day for almost anyone, which is exactly what a country of cyclists should have.

But we have never forgotten Hualien, or the particular ride it offers. Some places stay with you. Hualien is one of them, and we always meant to go back to it properly, on our own terms rather than the KOM's.

Onward to Hualien

We are heading back now, stronger and better prepared than we were on that first trip. We know the roads, which parts to ride & which to skip. And better than we did in 2023, how to give a rider all of its beauty of Hualien without asking them to be a climber to earn it.

That is the funny thing about Taiwan, and it is also the whole point of what we do. The best part of a place should be within reach of the people who came to enjoy it, not only the people who came to conquer it.

We hope to see you on the roads.