To wrap up our trip to Taiwan, and the photo series on my site, the last couple of days in Taipei were fair low key. We said goodbye to Jay, Lilian, and Leila, and caught a lunchtime train to Taichang, switched over to the high speed train there and were in Taipei within the hour [...]

We left Taipei early in the morning on the Friday and caught the first available speed train to Taichang. From there, we’d hop onto a different, regular train, that would take us to Changhua, where my good friend and former housemate/workmate Jay now lives with his family. You may recall I’ve been there twice before, [...]

Over the last week, Em and I traveled to Taiwan for our vacation. For Em, visiting Taiwan was a long held dream, made especially more difficult seeing as she is from the mainland and until the last couple of years, almost impossible to secure a holiday visa. She did manage to get one, after a [...]

Day 8 and our last day in Taiwan. I think its fair to say at about this stage of our holiday we’re happy that the end was near. The heat in Taipei had been very draining and made a lot of our time walking around a living hell. Also, we’d seen much of what Taipei [...]

Day 7 started early with a quick 10 minute (if that) drive to the bus terminal from our motel. We hired a car for the journey through the motel think that it would be a considerably longer drive, and the fair of about $15 seemed a little high. But we got there early enough to [...]

We made an early start on day 6 and headed out with Jay and Lilian to Changhua train station and caught the first train we could to Taichang. I’ve never been to Taichang before I I was happy to see something a little different. Taichung County (臺中縣 or 台中縣) is a county in central Taiwan, [...]

After walking around the Big Buddha and the surrounding hilly area, where all quite tired. Jay sprung it on us that Lilian’s family had planned to take us out for the night and we had an hour to get to the restaurant. Great. We rushed back to the hotel, had a shower (I let Jay [...]

Day 3 and the typhoon Fung-Wong hits Taiwan. This meant our plans to go to Sun Moon Lake had to be cancelled as the roads had either been closed or swept away by the flood waters. On the news we saw just how bad the damage was. Thankfully, in Changhua where we were, the typhoon [...]

Day 2 started with a well deserved sleep in. With such a long day the day before, and a late night drinking and smoking, I needed a few extra hours to recover. I looked outside my motel and noticed they had bought me breakfast, that was hanging from a hook in a plastic bag. I [...]

Day 1 of our trip was always going to be a bit of a nightmare. I didn’t think I would sleep the night before, but amazingly I did and was only awoken by my alarm at 3:30 in the morning. I had a quick shower, kissed Em goodbye, and was out the door with my [...]