One island, anticlockwise, in nine days

Arrive Taipei

Met at Taoyuan and driven in. Taoyuan is the international airport; Songshan, much closer to the centre, handles domestic flights and a few regional ones, including Tokyo Haneda and Shanghai Hongqiao, which is worth knowing if you are connecting from Japan rather than flying in long haul.

Nothing scheduled. If you land early enough, the thing to do is eat: Yongkang Street for beef noodle soup, then the lanes behind it, which are where the city actually shops.

Taipei on foot

The morning is Longshan temple and the streets around it: a Buddhist and Taoist temple in one, busy at eight in the morning with people who are there to petition rather than to look, and a herbalist quarter next door that has not changed its trade in a century. Then Bopiliao, one street of surviving Qing and Japanese-era shophouses, which explains what the rest of Taipei used to look like.

The afternoon is the National Palace Museum, and it needs a guide more than any other building on this journey. The collection came out of Beijing with the Nationalists in 1949 and is far too large to show at once; without someone choosing forty objects for you, it is three hours of vitrines. Evening at Raohe or Ningxia night market, which are the two we send people to.

Taipei to Hualien, and into the gorge

South on the conventional east coast line in the morning, which runs between the mountains and the Pacific for most of the way and is a better ride than the high-speed train it is often compared with. Car and guide meet the train at Hualien.

The afternoon goes into Taroko: a gorge cut through marble by the Liwu river, with a road blasted along the side of it by hand in the 1950s. Which trails are open is decided by the park authority day by day after rain and rockfall, and that decision is genuinely unpredictable — we confirm the morning you go and build the day around what is running.

Taroko, and the road above it

A full day in the park. If the main gorge trails are open, this is the Shakadang and the Swallow Grotto in the morning and the Baiyang water curtain in the afternoon. If they are not, the day goes up the cross-island highway instead, climbing out of the marble into cloud forest and, at the top, a landscape that has nothing to do with the tropics at all.

Helmets are handed out at the gorge entrance and they are not decorative. Rockfall is the reason the trails close.

Down the Pacific coast to Taitung

The whole day is the coast road, Highway 11, which runs with the sea on one side and the coastal range on the other for almost its entire length. We stop at Shitiping for the stepped rock terraces, at a roadside stall for rice wrapped in bamboo leaf, and at the Tropic of Cancer marker, which is a concrete obelisk and worth exactly the four minutes it takes.

Taitung at the end of it is the least developed provincial capital on the island and the one with the strongest indigenous presence. Amis and Puyuma communities are the reason the food and the music here are not the same as the food and music two hundred kilometres north.

Taitung to Tainan

Round the bottom of the island by rail through the south link, which spends much of its length in tunnels under the southern end of the central range, then across to Tainan. It takes most of the morning and there is no shorter way that is not a flight.

Tainan was the capital for two hundred years before Taipei was anything, and it is the reason to give this journey nine days rather than seven. The afternoon is Anping: the fort the Dutch built in 1624, the tree house where a banyan has eaten a warehouse, and the oyster omelettes on the way back.

Tainan: temples in use, and the eating

Tainan holds more registered temples than any other city in Taiwan and the ones that matter are not the largest. The Confucius temple, the Grand Matsu temple and the Official God of War temple are within a walk of each other, and the point of doing them with a guide is that you will otherwise miss what the people around you are doing: the divination blocks, the paper money, the birthday of a god that happens to be that week.

The afternoon is deliberately loose, because Tainan is a food city and eating here is a schedule of small things rather than a meal: danzai noodles, milkfish congee, shrimp rolls, and a shaved ice at the end of it. We will walk you through a dozen stalls if you want that, or leave you the map and get out of the way.

Up into the middle: Sun Moon Lake

North and inland, climbing away from the plain into the hills at the centre of the island. Sun Moon Lake is the traditional territory of the Thao, whose village on the south shore is small and worth an hour with someone who can explain what you are looking at.

The afternoon is the lake itself: the boat across to Xuanguang, the climb to the Ci’en pagoda, or the cycle path along the north-west shore, which is flat and takes about two hours at an unhurried pace. Evenings here empty out once the day buses leave, which is the argument for sleeping at the lake rather than driving through it.

Alishan can be swapped in instead, and about one party in three does it. It means an earlier start, a night at altitude and a dawn call for the cloud sea; the upper section of the forest railway has a long history of typhoon closures, so we confirm what is actually running before we commit you to it.

Back to Taipei by high-speed rail, and depart

Down to Taichung in the morning and on to the high-speed line, which puts you at Taoyuan airport station or Taipei Main in a bit over an hour. This is a travel day and it only works with an afternoon or evening flight.

If you are on a morning departure, tell us at the enquiry stage and we add a ninth night in Taipei rather than sending you down the island at four in the morning. That is a real extra night, priced, not a rearrangement.