It’s been more than two months since I wrote about our forthcoming December trip to Taiwan. The lull of notes about it hasn’t been because of a lack of activity in its preparation. Rather, things were so fluid for a while with back and forth changes to our proposed itinerary.
Still, a good number of details have been firmed up with just two months to go. So, just writing it out at the top of my head:
It didn’t take long for us to realize that there’s just too much to see in Taiwan for us to cover the length of the island in a single trip, and even if we stuck to just the western side. I’ll do a separate post soon once we firm up the fine itinerary a little more, but the general sequence goes like this:
5 days in Taichung, including an overnight in Cingjing
1 day in Hualien
6 days in Taipei
Our accommodations have been booked across the four places we’ll be spending one or more overnights in. There’s quite a bit of range in Taichung and Taipei, not unexpected since these are well-built-up areas. Interestingly, a number of private stays for Taichung were essentially more studio apartments which were barely larger than a hotel room, though also in fairly high-rise condo-styled apartment blocks. The harder places to decide was in Cingjing, with the priciest properties situated near the town center and also offering the best views of the mountain ranges.
A significant decision we also had to make was whether to visit Hualien as a day trip out of Taipei, or head straight to Hualien from Taichung via Taipei altogether. The advantage of the former was of of course reducing the continuous amount of time we’d spend traveling from Taichung to Hualien – including transfers, it would be about 4 hours, but at the expense of reducing the time we’d spend in Taipei. So, we went with the latter option: we’d travel via high-speed rail from Taichung to Taipei, then connect via another train from Taipei to Hualien.
Most tourists to Taiwan will typically book personal drivers for the trip. Going with the personal blogs of other visitors, it’s quite possible to find a single driver for the entire trip – but that was another option we discarded early on. Specifically, we reasoned that if we get a bad driver, we’re stuck with him and buggered haha. Just as importantly, the costs seemed higher as you’d also have to factor in driver accommodation costs too.
Accessing a pool of drivers also seemed less difficult than we’d mentally prepare ourselves. For starters, there are again plenty of driver reviews everywhere, especially in blogsphere. And as a fall back, there are also booking sites for day tours with standard itineraries, and even ones that allow you to customized activity by activity itineraries with adaptive pricing to match. The very rough ballpark cost of engaging a driver seemed to be between SGD180 to SGD230, with additional charges for size of vehicles, length of the day, distance traveled, and also whether the driver could speak English. We were fairly certain we’d be fine with a Mandarin-only speaking driver, but we found and booked a driver for the Taichung leg who was conversant in English nonetheless. We haven’t booked our Taipei or Hualien drivers yet, but figured those will be easy to find.
Cathay Pacific has also been sending numerous emails amending parts of the flight, which left me with a bit of a bad taste in the mouth. Firstly, they changed our seats for the Hong Kong to Taipei leg of our outbound flight without needing our consent, then re-timed our return home flight so that we’d get back to Singapore an hour later than the initial plan. I’d expected better from a full-priced airline: we’ve never had a budget airline re-time our flight by more than 10-15 minutes.
Next post on our current itinerary!
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