The first thing I noticed upon arriving at a trailhead in Yushan National Park in Taiwan was a saxophonist jamming on the side of the road. Eyes closed, he was immersed in his music, surrounded by staggering mountains and verdant forest. He seemed to be expressing his joy at being in nature, which in Taiwan, I found, is never far away.
As I entered the park, the faint notes of the sax blended with the insistent murmurs of cicadas and the rustling of leaves. Hiking a portion of the historic Walami Trail, in a park that Indigenous groups have long inhabited, my partner and I saw only a handful of people. Mostly we took in sensational views of waterfalls and river valleys, and searched for elusive wildlife like muntjac deer and rock macaques. As we crossed a gently swaying suspension bridge, the world felt far away.
It was hard to believe that the trailhead was a brief cab ride from a major train station in Hualien, the largest city on Taiwan’s rugged east coast, home to roughly 100,000 people.
We hadn’t known much about traveling in Taiwan before our weeklong trip there. Sure, I was familiar with tourism buzzwords like bubble tea, night markets and the bamboo-stalk-like Taipei 101. But I was in the dark about the extent and accessibility of Taiwan’s bounty of nature until I talked with local experts.
International tourists have a “pretty low awareness” of Taiwan, said Michael McCreesh, a co-founder of Origin Wild, a local tour company.
“Seventy percent of the country is covered in forests and mountains, but the image of Taiwan in a lot of Western minds is an industrial manufacturing hub that’s an urban hellscape,” he said.
Premier outdoor experiences like hiking, cycling, surfing, diving and canyoning are available on the east coast — where “Taiwan truly shines,” according to Mr. McCreesh — and can all generally be reached by a fast train or car ride.
My goal was to explore the country’s east coast. We started in Taitung, a laid-back city along the oblong-shaped island’s southeastern coast, and traveled via car and train over a week, ending the trip in Taipei, in the northern part of the island.
In the sleepy township of Yuli, we plunged in the scalding, sulfurous waters of a hot spring discovered a century ago during the Japanese occupation. We marveled at the roads carving through the mountains of Taroko National Park and at its vertiginous cliffs. We cycled in surreal places, including through rice fields in Chishang, a rural town in Taitung, wedged in the valley between the Central and Coastal mountain ranges. The fields glowed neon green.
“People arrive and have little or no expectation,” said Mark Pemberton, the founder of Life of Taiwan, a local company specializing in private tours. “They don’t know there is stunning scenery waiting for them.”
A Destination With Challenges
The majority of Taiwan’s visitors come from other Asian countries. Tourism experts say that while interest in Taiwan is increasing, the island faces a marketing problem.
Unlike other Asian destinations, such as Vietnam, Japan, Singapore and the Philippines, that are seeing brisk tourism business, Taiwan has yet to approach the record 11.9 million visitors it had in 2019. This can be partly attributed to the relationship between mainland China and Taiwan.
In the summer of 2019, China — Taiwan’s largest source of tourists at the time — slashed the number of citizens permitted to visit the island; restrictions still apply, and visitors from China last year made up only about 5 percent of the total. Since 2022, when Taiwan opened its borders after nearly two and a half years because of the pandemic, growth has been promising, with 3.5 million visitors arriving between January and May this year, up nearly 11 percent from the year-earlier period.
Many are Americans; the United States is Taiwan’s largest source of visitors outside Asia. Several Taiwanese airlines are introducing routes connecting Taipei to more cities in the United States — Phoenix and Dallas-Fort Worth — and EVA Air, one of the island’s major carriers, recently announced a new partnership with Southwest Airlines that facilitates passenger connections.
In addition to the ongoing challenge of rising tensions with Beijing, Taiwan is prone to earthquakes and typhoons. A deadly quake that struck the country in April 2024 shut major attractions along the east coast and continues to limit tourism to the area. Last month, a typhoon brought heavy rains and flooding to Hualien County, killing at least 18 people after a barrier lake near the rural town of Guangfu overflowed.
In Taroko National Park — one of Taiwan’s top tourist attractions, famed for its river-carved gorge and challenging hiking trails — the earthquake set off landslides and rockslides. Though the park is gradually reopening, most of the trails remain closed and the operating hours of the highway through the park are reduced. It’s unclear when the park will be fully open.
Several tour operators in Taiwan say that they’re still not recommending Taroko. Without this attraction, clients are less interested in visiting the Hualien area in general, said Core Liu, a tour consultant at Topology Travel, a local tour operator.
My partner and I decided to see what we could by staying a night at Silks Place Taroko, an elegant hotel inside the park. It reopened in January, after being closed for several months. Within the park, there were clear signs of damage. Fallen rocks and rubble were heaped on the side of the main road. A river by the hotel, famed for being a crystalline blue, ran a dingy gray from sediment and rocky debris.
Still, the luxurious hotel’s wild setting was remarkable. Soaking in the rooftop pool, surrounded by towering tree-covered cliffs of layered marble, felt like floating in the sky. The buffet, which showcased local produce like roselle, a variety of hibiscus; pomelo; and a crunchy green plant known as white water snowflake, was a delight. To keep guests entertained, the hotel offers a packed daily itinerary of classes including cooking and gardening.
“Since the earthquake, Silks Place Taroko has leaned into a new kind of journey,” said Sunny Hsieh, a spokeswoman for the hotel. “One that celebrates the art of simply staying well within the hotel.”
But this hasn’t enticed enough guests so far. Occupancy at the hotel has been sluggish, hovering around 24 percent this year, compared with over 60 percent before the pandemic.
The World Just a Few Hours Away
Relying exclusively on cabs and trains did limit our destinations, and we found that the townships and cities we stopped in, including Ji’an, Taitung and Yuli, weren’t that easily navigated on foot. We selected hotels, like the Antong Hot Spring Hotel in Yuli, for their charm and not their convenience to other attractions and restaurants. But taking the regional train was peaceful, with beautiful vistas of symmetrical rice fields and hills shrouded in clouds.
In Hualien, we rode creaky bikes along a coastal path to Qixingtan Beach, meandering past stone quarries and beneath canopies of lush trees. We chanced upon a cafe with a whimsically far-ranging menu, serving goat milk lattes, freshly baked bread, and schweinshaxe, a German pork knuckle dish. The path ended at the sleepy fishing village of Dahan. We sat on an empty, rocky beach, gazing at the looming mountains and the cerulean Pacific Ocean.
A two-and-a-half-hour train ride later, we were in Taipei sipping cocktails at the opulent lobby bar in the Capella Hotel, which opened in April in the city’s Songshan District. Then, we headed to a white-tablecloth dim sum restaurant. We fell back into the rhythm of city life, and ended up drinking in the Da’an neighborhood, home to many notable bars including underLab, where cocktail culture is so revered that the drinks are spotlighted from above. It was easy to get around the city and later, to the airport, with the efficient Taipei Metro.
Travel experts living in Taiwan emphasized that this variety is what sets the island apart as a destination — and its own tourism marketing doesn’t showcase that adequately.
“You can enjoy the mountain and sea and even the city life, maybe during just one day,” Ms. Liu said, adding that Taiwan’s marketing often shows the same few things: beef noodles and the legendary soup dumplings known as xiao long bao.
The final two days we spent in Taipei were a jarring contrast to the east coast’s wild and rural landscapes and sleepier towns. Here, there were bustling specialty shopping streets packed with vendors selling tea, traditional medicine and mochi. We visited ornate temples and night markets selling local specialties, like lu rou fan, an aromatic braised pork belly over rice that I still dream about.
On the last day of the trip, I craved another dose of the outdoors. But a rainstorm dashed my hopes of hiking in Yangmingshan National Park, a mountain range with hot springs and volcanic peaks about an hour’s bus ride away from Taipei. I shifted gears for a different kind of experience emblematic of Taiwan. At Sihai Soy Milk, a breakfast shop in Datong, I inhaled steaming soup dumplings and pungent savory soy milk dotted with bits of fried dough. I felt confident I was starting the day right.
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Christine Chung is a Times reporter covering airlines and consumer travel.
Chang W. Lee has been a photographer for The Times for 30 years, covering events throughout the world. He is currently based in Seoul. Follow him on Instagram @nytchangster.
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