Taiwan: Summer - April 2015

 

The first time I went to Taiwan was in 1997. I remember it well cause it coincided with Lady Diana's death.  I remember watching television in my hotel room, while typhoon raging outside listening to the tragic story. It was my country independence day too - 31 August.

Now after close to 18 years later, I figured it is time to revisit the country. Furthermore my visit back in 1997 was only to Taipei. This time round I got to move around a bit :)

Our itinerary was:
28 April 2015  Kuala Lumpur - Taoyuan
29 April 2015  Taoyuan - Taichung - Nantou
30 April 2015  Nantou - Yilan
1 May 2015     Yilan - Yangmingshan - Taipei
2 May 2015     Taipei - Yehliu - Taipei
3 May 2015     Taoyuan - Kuala Lumpur

Surprisingly I found the present day Taiwan less vibrant than before. The roads were quite empty. When I went there in the 90s, there were so many youngsters on motorbikes. The locals call them them suicycles (suicide motorcycles) but now so few of them on the road.

Sadly except for Yehliu Geopark (highly recommended), I found Taiwan so boring. The buildings are dated and messy. So uninspiring. Even the iconic Taipei 101 lacks energy. But one thing good about Taiwan according to the local guide is its low crime rate. The city is very clean too :) The immigration officers are friendlier too compared to the 90s :P

The tour was organised by Poto Travels & Tours and the price per person was RM3759. It was a full board tour. Since we followed Muslim tours, can't really comment about their authentic local food. Their halal restaurants are quite limited. The food that were served to us was mostly palatable.

I just want to put on record that I was quite disappointed with Poto for this trip. Their itinerary stated that there is an opportunity to pluck fruits from the trees at the leisure farm. The reality was you can't even spy any fruits on the trees! How misleading!

 

I've uploaded 225 pictures for your viewing pleasure. You can view the pictures at my Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/mkhasha.n.travels/. Go to the photo albums.

Njoy!!

Prologue

When I was doing a research on "when is the best time to go to a particular city", I had this wishful thinking - if only I can see pictures of the city during that particular month of the year. As a normal tourist, I have a very limited time. More often than not the organised tour will only last a week. If I travel on my own only then maybe I can prolong it to 3 weeks.

The point I'm trying to make is for a short-term traveller like me, timing of the visits is everything. It will decide whether I will get great experience or just nice ones.

You will think that should be easy right to find the relevant pictures in the internet? Not necessarily so. If you are lucky, you can find them in some travel blogs. Unfortunately the pictures posted are too few. Most of the pictures I'm looking for are actually stored in personal facebook accounts of the travellers.

I know a friend who posted thousands of her beautiful travel photos in her personal facebook account for the viewing pleasure of her friends only. I'm sure my friend is not abnormal, there are millions like her. I'm not abnormal either, I'm sure there are millions like me too who wants to know when is the best time to go by looking at the pictures of fellow travellers.

With that in mind, I've decided to create this blog to share my travel photos with the masses. Hopefully it will help some of you to plan for the perfect timing to take your well deserved holidays. They will be stored in my facebook account. Search for M Kha Sha. I will tag the albums as "public" so feel free to browse through. I will also try to give details - date, place - as much as I can remember them. Some of the pictures are close to 10 years old!

Another reason why I created this blog is so that I can monitor how many countries that I've set foot on and when. Sometimes details can get hazy after a while.

Since the pictures posted will be only those post "digital camera" era, there will be a few cities that I've been to which will not be covered. So I'm listing them now just for my own record: Lake Toba, Hong Kong, Taipei, Beijing, Tehran, Melbourne, Seoul. I don't normally bring my camera during business trips so cities like Jakarta, Manila, Phnom Penh and Bangkok will not be covered either.

This will be an on going project. I will only update this blog whenever I have new travel photos. As such, do subscribe to my M Kha Sha facebook account if you wish to be notified of any new updates.

Njoy!!