Taiwan 2007 – Day 1

Been taking some photos, so figured good excuse to write a post and put them up.

Well arrived in Taiwan on Sunday 8th April, and immediately made our way to the High Speed Rail (高鐵) and travelled the 271.6km from Taoyuan (where the airport is) to Tainan. First impressions of Taiwan, its really really flat. Taoyuan is in the outskirts of Taipei, which is probably why, but all the buildings in Tainan are still really flat.

Taiwan High Speed Train Station – Taoyuan

Inside however, everything is modern and sparse. It seems that all the train stations have a 7-eleven and a Mos burger joint. The beauty of franchising.

Inside the Train Station

The train itself is quite nice, but the tickets are very expensive. The economy seats were all taken, So we had to take the business class seats. NT1990!!!!!! thats like BND91. Economy seating is half that, which still does not make it cheap. I guess its reasonable for the distance we were covering.

Train arriving at the Station


The dude is enjoying the sound of the train..:)

Most of the land between Taoyuan and Tainan are farming land, or at least the parts the train passed through were. The train stations are built quite far from the city itself. We had to travel about half hour from the Tainan Station to our Hotel.

We went to the night market in Tainan on our first night. Its like a mass of people, smells and sounds not unlike our pasar malam, just multiply everything by like 10 or 100. It was funfair games mixed in with a flea market selling clothes and such and then put food stalls in between them. “Organised Chaos” is what my sister called it.

There were a couple of stores which sold some very interesting corn. The corn were red. They usually coat it with a peanut (satay) sauce and barbeque it.

Then in the middle of all the chaos was a prawn fishing store. The prawns are in a tub, and they give you a stick with a bit of string with a loop in it. You get to “fish” for your prawn, which you can immediately barbeque it to perfection.

Overall, an interesting first day. Tainan reminds me much of China, with all the low buildings and the way people dress. Even the so called fashionable young crowd looks like they stepped out of the 1980s. Jane Fonda and all. Instead of bicycles, everyone seem to have a scooter and lots of them are vespas!