Taipei revisited

By Alex Villafania
INQUIRER.net

TALK about the world’s biggest “marriage proposal.”

As you can see from the photo, someone posted the message: “Marry Me? Diana” on the world’s tallest building, Taipei 101. (This article from UK-based The Inquirer claims it’s a fake proposal to drum up business–Ed.)

Taipei 101 is one of Taiwan’s tourist attractions. While Taiwan does not really market itself as a major tourist destination, it attracts a lot of visitors as one of the world’s major electronics manufacturing hub. Usually, foreign investors come to Taipei to discuss business with their Taiwanese counterparts and afterwards leave. However, the few foreigners who do have time to kill find that the country is not just ready for business, but is also a source of pleasure littered with pockets of attractions. The capital, Taipei, itself is big enough to give a sense of wonder to the lucky visitors.

Height is might

Taipei 101, currently the world’s tallest building at 1,671 feet, is a major tourist attraction. As the name implies, it has 101 floors for commercial purposes. From beyond the city’s perimeter, tourists will see that Taipei 101 is the only really tall structure and even the other tall buildings are just dwarves, not reaching even half its height. It will be the most familiar structure when coming from the Taipei airport.

Like all record-holding structures, Taipei 101 has an observation deck. This is located on the 89th floor and the admission ticket is about US$10 per person. Its main feature is the open air observation deck at the 91st floor, which allows visitors to go outside. However, it closes during bad weather and on these days, only the lower observation area is open.

The building is also said to be the world’s tallest advertising structure and is also one of the most expensive at NT$4, 000, 000 or US$121, 000 per month.

Whale watching

A two-hour drive from Taipei is the fishing port of Wushih in Yilin County. It is along the coastline facing the Pacific Ocean. It is also one of the more popular sites for whale watching. Taiwan is home to a third of the world’s cetaceans, comprising of whales, porpoises and dolphins. Various cetaceans can be found in Taiwan’s Pacific-side coast from bottlenose dolphins, false killer whales and humpback whales. There would be days when these animals will show some aerial acrobatics but on other days they will quietly slip away from incoming boats to appear in a farther area.

Occasionally, lucky visitors will get a chance to see whale sharks.

The waters off Yilin are calm, almost glassy with no winds or waves to disturb the peace. Visitors will ride in government sanctioned tour boats with specialized viewing seats at the ships bow to give whale watchers an unobstructed view of the animals. These tour boats usually take around an hour to get to the whales’ feeding or breeding grounds.

Unfortunately, trash also litters the seas off Taiwan, especially those near the whales’ feeding spots. Garbage is left off by tourists and some by commercial fishing vessels and could pose a health threat to the animals that eat mostly small fish, krill and other tiny crustaceans. The government of Taiwan has already promised to do something about it in order to maintain Taiwan’s prestige as a destination for whale watchers.

Arts and culture

Taiwan is also home to Asia’s most prolific artists and some are located in the Yilan Culture Center, another two-hour drive from Taipei. Yilan Culture Center is also one of the biggest art-related structures ever made and is set in a sprawling five-hectare property. The architectural design depicts Taiwan’s historical legacy from mainland China as the buildings are made with traditional Chinese red bricks. It also provides visitors a sense of Taiwan’s own cultural development with its painters, sculptors, writers, puppeteers, playwrights and stage actors.

The Yilan Culture Center is complete with a traditional Chinese temple, indoor and outdoor stages for plays and puppet shows, a river tour, at least two indoor theaters, and a huge museum of artwork from famed bamboo sculptors dating as far back as the early 1900s.

The photo shows an offering at the traditional Buddhist temple.

Nearby shops in at least two buildings also sell contemporary art decorations, trinkets, raditional clothes, stage puppets or marionettes, and traditional Chinese sweets.

Home sweet home

One place in Taiwan that is so similar to the Philippines’ own mountainous Baguio City and Tagaytay is Jiufen (or Chiufen), a village carved out on the side of a mountain overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Jiufen once guaranteed riches for people looking to mine or trade gold in the late 1800s. Once a poor village, the discovery of gold attracted prospectors from all over Taiwan. But it later declined as gold become more difficult to find.

For decades, Jiufen remained a wreck until the government stepped up to construct newer establishments in the late 1980s to make it more attractive for local and foreign visitors. Its location perhaps appealed most to the government as Jiufen was on a mountainside and had a huge wharf over the sea. Jiufen was also used as a location for the opular Taiwanese film “A City of Sadness,” as well as in the Japanese anime movie “Spirited Away.”

Jiufen’s houses are built on the mountainside and the roads are mostly one-way streets zigzagging from below up to the top houses. Surprisingly, the roads are not difficult to traverse as the streets only gradate for a few degrees. However, there are shortcuts of steep concrete steps that are almost 50 feet in height.

Most of the business establishments sell food, trinkets and clothes but there are specialized shops that sell second-hand books and antiques.

There are also multi-level restaurants with the top floor being used for open-air dining. Jiufen is so peaceful that all of the houses do not have porches and the living rooms are separated from the roads only by the houses’ front wall.

All of these places can be visited in a day but these are surely the most memorable places to be found in Taiwan.

There are about a dozen other counties that have picturesque views and it could take almost a week to visit all of the best places in Taiwan.

(Editor’s note: Check out Alex Villafania’s coverage of Taiwan’s Computex 2007 for Tech Addicts.)

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