Taroko Gorge

The bus from Hualien drops you at the park entrance before the gorge has properly woken up. Mist sits in the upper reaches of the canyon like something left over from the night before. The Liwu River below — improbably, offensively turquoise — moves without urgency through a channel it has been cutting through marble for two million years. I stood at that railing on the Shakadang Trail for longer than I should have admitted to Lia, trying to decide if the colour was real or some trick of the morning light. It was real. The river is tinted by fine marble sediment suspended in glacial runoff, and no photograph I took came close to it.

Inside the Mountain

What nobody tells you about Taroko before you go is that you will spend part of your time literally inside the cliff. The Zhuilu Old Road — a former aboriginal hunting trail widened by Japanese colonial engineers in the 1910s — cuts a narrow ledge along a sheer rock face several hundred metres above the gorge floor. In places it is barely wide enough for two people to pass. Helmets are required on the approach path, where the road tunnels straight through the marble. Inside, the stone is cool and damp and faintly pink, and the sound of the river below disappears entirely. Lia went quiet in there. So did I.

The Tunnel of Nine Turns — Jiuqudong — is the section that appears on every postcard, and it earns it. Nine carved portals open onto the gorge like windows someone punched through the mountain at intervals, each one framing a slightly different angle of the white canyon walls and the green water threading between them. I kept stopping to photograph the same view from each opening and only later realised I had done it nine times.

What the Gorge Feeds You

Hualien is the nearest city and its night market on Zhongshan Road is where I ate the best scallion pancake of my life — flaky, eggy, eaten standing up at eleven at night with a paper cup of cold soy milk. The local specialty is indigenous Amis cuisine: wild boar sausage grilled over charcoal, millet wine served warm, bitter greens I couldn’t name that tasted faintly of pine. The morning we left, I bought a bag of Hualien taro pineapple cake from a bakery near the station and ate two of them on the bus back before we reached the tunnel.

The unexpected thing was the birdsong. I had expected rock and river. I had not expected the gorge walls to be threaded with subtropical forest, or for the sound of the Mikado pheasant — Taiwan’s national bird, improbably vivid blue and chestnut — to carry down from the tree canopy above the Baiyang Trail in the early morning. The planet showing off, in several registers at once.

When to go: March to May offers mild temperatures, lower rainfall, and good visibility in the gorge. Avoid July and August, when typhoon season regularly closes trails and roads for days at a time.