I had the immense pleasure to have my friend Audrey that came to visit me for 2 weeks. It was my first friend to come and we took her visit as an opportunity to discover a new Asian country. We picked Taiwan, or the Formosa island. When Audrey stayed almost a week in Taipei, we only had 2 days with L. but we managed to visit both the capital city and Wulai, small city at around 30 km southern from Taipei.

I must admit and I hear from here the surprised and outraged comments from everybody: I didn’t enjoy the city that much. I mean, the food was good and the city itself is nice but we were not blown away by the gastronomy as everybody said we would.

We walked in the streets, discovered a wonderful food market and visited the iconic temple ‘Mengjia Longshan’. We even been to the arty district and wandered through tiny typical streets.

Mengjia Longshan Temple (8/10): No.211 Guangzhou Street, Wanhua District, Taipei.

We took a walk in the entire city and visited the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall where there was the daily Changing the Guard Ceremony and lost ourselves in the city’ streets to arrive in a tiny restaurant where we had our first #Taiwanesemeal. We then went and climbed up to the tallest tower in the World ‘Taipei 101’, where the view was quite impressive.

Two days in the capital and another city is really short so we had to head-up to take our bus to Wulai (around 1 hour ride). We arrive under a pouring rain again and had to find our hotel in the night and under the rain. We just passed by the Saturday night village party and came in a hotel randomly, which happened to be the good one. We had an amazing #bath in the room, furnished with the natural hot spring water.

Wulai is famous for his landscape known as “Taipei’s back garden” and its hot springs. It is a good way to enjoy calm and escape from Tapei’s bustle. On Sunday, we’ve been to see the local waterfall (around 80m tall) and play cards while enjoying some fresh drinks as the weather was really hot. You can also visit a museum that explains and shows aboriginal folk art.

Then we discovered a cute temple on our way to the hot springs – which we literally struggled to find – but a priest speaking English gave us the way eventually. In my head, when you said hot springs, it was hot water. But the water was definitely very hot – boiling should I say – and I almost burn myself. The facility is almost not artificial: some big pool carved host the natural hot water coming up from behind the rocks. We had some hesitations to go in as we were the only Western people in the place but then, a local man nicely showed us the way and how to do it (especially to my friend Audrey ; )).

Rudimentary stairs in the water and some cords enabled us to enjoy the river’s hard flow and to get our back naturally massed from it. I tried to talk and practice my #Mandarin with some people in the water but it was quite hard even if I understood few sentences. After this invigorating bath, we took another ride in the city main street and tried new street food. Audrey even tried the famous Chinese “Stinky tofu” which was all it was supposed to be – unfortunately!

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I would definitely recommend travelling to Taipei for 2/3 days – maybe take more time to explore the city and the culinary specialties, which we didn’t do. Taiwan seems to be a fabulous country, mostly the West part with the magnificient nature. Take a tour to Wulai and try the more typical Taiwan county life.