Got back last night...
Executive summary:
1) The Taiwan Tourism Board should be fired and replaced by a group that can relay to the world how beautiful the island is.
2) Package tours can be miserable experiences.
A typical Taiwan view:
Arrived in Taipei after a 13 hour flight. Thankfully the counter personnel took one look at me and put me in exit row, which meant I had
six feet of leg room. It was still the least comfortable seat I've ever encountered -- the seats were so short, my butt was only a couple inches off the ground.
This turned out to be par-for-the-course in Taiwan. All the chairs were about six inches too short, my feet hung off the end of the beds, the toilets felt like "child training toilets" etc. I also got a LOT of stares and questions about my basketball prowess.
That's my only real gripe though, Taiwan is gorgeous. Easily one of the most beautiful places I've visited. The island is roughly the size of Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island combined. And in that small area, it has black sand beaches, hot springs, mist-shrouded mountains, canyons, jungles, grassland and more. The environmental damage they did in the 1960s through 1980s has been largely reversed. Their mantra these days is, "We want to be the Switzerland of the East!" (Makes a lot of sense politically.)
Unfortunately, we did this trip the way my mother-in-law likes to travel -- a package tour. Granted, we saw a whole lot of stuff for not a lot of money. But we also wasted a lot of time on things that didn't interest us (like mummified deer fetuses) and the amount of time we were allowed at any one place was woefully lacking. That was the first (and last) package tour for us.
We'll be going back to Taiwan in the near future and spending more time at Taroko gorge, Kenting and the East Coast.
We got off the plane and almost immediately into a bus. Keep in mind that this bus was populated largely by Taiwanese expatriates. The tour was in Chinese. The only English spoken was my wife occasionally translating for me. ("The tour guide is saying she looks like some Chinese movie star. Now she's talking about the president. Now she's talking about her favorite skin cream.") After awhile, she quit translating, and I spent the bulk of my time in the bus wearing noise-canceling headphones and snapping pictures out the window.
After a 13-hour flight, we put in a full day of sightseeing. By the end of the day I was particularly grumpy from sleep deprivation. (We worked it out the following morning, we had been up for 38 hours.)
First up was the National Theater. This is a grandiose complex of buildings that was built as an ROC answer to Tiananmen Square:
Then we visited the Hall of the Martyrs for the hourly changing of the guard and finally the fishing village of Danshui.
Punctuating sightseeing was lunch and dinner. All lunches and dinners were basically the same -- a gut-busting feast served "family style" to tables of 10 on a lazy susan. Every meal was good (some were excellent). But I did not like the setting. My wife called it "competitive eating." Every time a new plate was dropped on the lazy susan, the Taiwan expats grabbed at it as if they hadn't eaten in days. This was especially true of more pricey dishes that included shrimp or (gasp!) sea cucumber. If we wanted to taste it, we had to join in the fray.
That meant the "crowd" set the pace of the meal. And that pace was always "hell-bent."
We finally settled into our hotel "The Grand." It was ostentatious. We had small interior rooms with no windows. This turned out to be par as well. We would prefer the best room at a 3-star to the worst room at a 5-star. But my wife and I were the only people who saw it that way.
[END OF PART ONE, more on the way...]