Shifen
"In Shifen, the train comes through the middle of the market, and everyone just steps aside like it's the most normal thing in the world."
A one-street mining town on the old Pingxi rail line, famous for a waterfall that out-Niagaras its size and for sky lanterns released directly over the train tracks.
The Pingxi Line train from Ruifang rattles along a single track for about forty minutes, stopping at towns so small the platforms barely qualify as stations, before it deposits you at Shifen — and the first thing you notice, stepping off, is that the “old street” isn’t beside the tracks. It runs directly along them, houses and stalls close enough on either side that the train seems to thread a needle through the town twice an hour.
Writing on the Sky
We’d read about the sky lanterns before arriving and still weren’t prepared for how central they are to the whole town’s identity. Vendors sell them in every color, each associated with a different wish — health, wealth, love, safety — and you write your hopes directly onto the paper sides in black ink before releasing it. Lia wrote something about her mother’s health on one side and, on the other, in Chinese characters a vendor helped her copy out, something I wasn’t allowed to read.
We lit ours standing between the rails — timed carefully, the vendor assured us, between trains — and watched it climb, wobbling, until it joined a handful of others drifting off toward the hills. It is a tourist ritual in the most literal sense, performed dozens of times a day by dozens of different couples, and it did not feel diminished by that fact even slightly.
A Waterfall That Outperforms Its Reputation
A fifteen-minute walk from the old street, Shifen Waterfall spreads nearly forty metres wide, a curtain of white water dropping into a pool the color of blue Curaçao liqueur. It’s regularly, and not unreasonably, called Taiwan’s Niagara — not for height but for that same horizontal sheet of falling water, and the mist that reaches the viewing platform on a windy day.
We sat on the rocks near the platform for close to an hour, damp with spray, watching a group of schoolchildren shriek every time the wind shifted the mist toward them. It was, by some distance, the loudest silence I’ve ever enjoyed.
When to go: Year-round, though the waterfall runs fullest after the summer rainy season (June–September). The Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival, held around Lunar New Year, draws enormous crowds and turns the whole valley into a single mass release — worth seeing once, but come on an ordinary weekday if you want the old street and waterfall to yourself.