Neihu
"Neihu is the version of Taipei nobody puts on a postcard, and it's exactly where I'd want to spend a slow Sunday."
Taipei's quiet tech-district riverside, where startup offices back onto wetland parks and a lake ringed by hiking trails.
Neihu was never on our itinerary. We ended up there because a friend of Lia’s was working a contract at one of the tech campuses out that way, and what was supposed to be a quick coffee turned into an entire unplanned afternoon that left me rethinking what I thought I knew about Taipei’s suburbs.
Bishan Bihu Park
Our friend walked us straight from the office park into Bishan Bihu Park, a small lake tucked directly behind the glass office towers, ringed by a paved path and thick with egrets standing motionless in the shallows. It is easy to forget, standing at the water’s edge with dragonflies crossing overhead, that a five-minute walk in the other direction puts you back among software companies and co-working spaces.
We climbed a short trail above the lake toward Bishanyan, a small temple and hermitage built into the hillside, its terrace giving a clean view back down over the water and, further off, the unmistakable silhouette of Taipei 101 rising out of the haze. It was strange to see the tower from this angle — distant, almost incidental, a landmark glimpsed from somewhere it clearly was not designed to be seen from.
Dahu Park and an Unplanned Dinner
As the light started to go gold we walked north to Dahu Park, a larger lake with a red arched bridge that locals treat as an evening walking loop — joggers, families with strollers, an elderly man doing tai chi alone on a wooden platform at the water’s edge. We sat on a bench and watched the bridge’s reflection ripple apart and reform every time a duck crossed it.
Dinner ended up being a plate of stir-fried noodles at a nondescript shop under an apartment block, recommended by our friend with the confidence of someone who had eaten there every week for two years. It was, without exaggeration, one of the best plates of noodles I had in the entire country, and I never learned the restaurant’s name.
When to go: Late afternoon into evening, any season, when the lakes catch the low light and the office crowds thin out. Spring brings the clearest skies for the Taipei 101 view from Bishanyan.