Hualien, Taiwan – Travelling Cooks

We made it for the 10 a.m. direct train to Hualien – it may not sound early but when you factor in our inability to get up early, a morning run, grabbing brekkie, and buying train tickets, it was quite a good achievement for a Sunday morning. The five-hour journey felt luxurious despite it being standard class. I fell asleep whilst James watched some bits on YouTube. When booking our accommodation, our host volunteered himself to pick us up from the train station, which we thought was very kind. Unfortunately, though, this didn’t quite materialize into an actual lift; they didn’t respond to a message I sent the day before confirming train times, nor any of our phone calls. A little annoying, but the 2.5 km walk was very scenic, which made it more enjoyable when lugging around our travel rucksacks in the hot sun.

Once we arrived at our accommodation, our host showed us to our room – a storage container! We couldn’t quite understand his English that well but vaguely understood he was our butler and that he would take us to a restaurant at 6:30 p.m. that day for dinner.

We were keen to get out and explore while the day was still light and the sun was out. I found somewhere that looked fairly nice on Google Maps so we headed there, but in reality, the views looked markedly different from online. James quite rightly commented that it was most likely because of the weather. On the walk, we visited a tribal village, which made the walk a lot more interesting, and there were information boards up with information about the tribes. We learnt that the tribal men and women had facial tattoos after they became fully mature. From a quick Google, it seemed that facial tattooing was banned under Japanese rule about 95 years ago. Despite it not being illegal now, we didn’t come across anyone with a facial tattoo in the village on our walk. The sun sadly went down, and the rain made an appearance whilst we were out on our walk. We ended up taking refuge under some trees at the tribal village. We were thankful to finally get back to our room (the storage container) to dry off.

The butler then took us to dinner – we had no idea where we were going. James did try asking a bit about what food was available, but we didn’t quite understand. It was time for James to suck it up and try some traditional Taiwanese food. Success – James tried and ate noodles! Surprisingly, James liked the noodles more than the pork. There wasn’t much to do after dinner, so we came back to our room and then watched some bits on the laptop together.

The main thing I wanted to do in this area was see Hualien Gorge. There was an earthquake earlier in the year, in April 2024, which severely affected the gorge. Despite emailing and looking online, I wasn’t sure if the gorge was partly open or not. The homestay had bikes which we used to ride up to the gorge. We stopped off at the Family Mart just opposite the homestay to pick up some bits for our breakfast. I had some chocolate blueberry bread, yoghurt with a very flattened granola bar which came from the UK, whilst James had yoghurt, spring onion bread, and a non-broken cereal bar (bought at the Family Mart).

We headed straight to the visitor centre to find out if the gorge was open or not, where unfortunately they confirmed that hardly anything was open, including the trails around the gorge, and only a few of the roads were temporarily open. The visitors’ centre was quite interesting though and had timeline photo updates from the effects of the earthquake to present-day developments. Despite the disappointment, I enjoyed cycling on the quieter roads which overlooked all the farming land where you could see the locals working hard.

This dog really wanted a game so James kept throwing him sticks to fetch.

For the rest of the day, we ventured to a nearby beach which had bright blue turquoise water with super huge waves. On the shore there was lots of wood and damage to some of the trees which weren’t protected by the tetrapods; I wondered if these were the aftereffects of the typhoon.

Once we got back to our homestay, we met the owner who asked us which train we were planning to take the following day. I showed him the 8:24 a.m. train, but he couldn’t find it on the website he was using. Instead, he only found one which was 2 hours later. He recommended booking the train at the station that day, so he kindly took us there. At the station, I asked if he could help ask the staff for their opinion on the best train to get to Tainan, to which he very seriously said “no.” I’m not sure if he completely understood what I meant, as up until now he had come across as very helpful. Thankfully, the station staff understood and mentioned the exact train I originally planned for us to take, so we bought tickets for that one. Once we got back to the homestay, our host told the butler how we were right about the train which he couldn’t find himself – the power of using Google!

With our train tickets sorted for the next day, we walked to a closer beach. It was a black sand beach which extended into a grey pebble beach with similar bright blue water to what we saw earlier. Other people were using the washed-up wood to make fires.

We had a little bit of time left until the host took us to dinner again, so we went to the 7-Eleven to buy train/breakfast snacks for the following day. We managed to get both our dinners for 135 TWD (£3.31), which was cheaper than our breakfast consisting of a few pastries. James enjoyed his spicy noodles, and I went for the same vegetable noodles with soup. Finally, my husband is starting to enjoy noodles – what a revelation this trip is. The butler picked us up and we got ourselves sorted for an early start.

Taiwan