Xitou
"Xitou is the only forest that has ever made me feel genuinely small, in the good sense of the word."
A university-managed forest of towering cypress and a suspended monkey-bridge walkway that puts you level with the canopy.
Xitou is managed by National Taiwan University as a research forest, which is a fairly dry way of describing a place that, within ten minutes of the entrance gate, made both Lia and I stop talking entirely and just look up. The cypress and cedar here were planted for timber studies decades ago and have since grown into a canopy so dense that the air underneath it runs several degrees cooler than the road outside, damp and green-smelling in a way that felt almost startling after weeks of Taiwan’s lowland heat.
The University Pond and a Silence I Wasn’t Ready For
Near the entrance sits Daxueh Pond, a small mirror-still body of water surrounded by towering trees, and it’s usually the first thing that stops visitors in their tracks. We arrived early enough to have it mostly to ourselves, just mist rising off the surface and the occasional plop of something unseen in the reeds. A groundskeeper raking leaves nearby didn’t look up once, as if he’d long since stopped noticing how good the view actually was.
The Monkey Bridge and the Man Behind Me Who Wouldn’t Stop Talking
Xitou’s signature feature is a suspended walkway strung between trees at canopy height, nicknamed the Monkey Bridge, that sways just enough to make you very aware of your own footing. Partway across, a middle-aged man behind us narrated the entire structural engineering of the bridge to his bored teenage son in rapid Mandarin, and though I understood maybe a third of it, his enthusiasm was contagious enough that I found myself checking the cable anchors more carefully on the way back.
The University Pole Road and Its Enormous Cedar
Deeper into the reserve, a trail called the University Pole Road leads to a cluster of red cedar so large that a boardwalk has been built specifically to let visitors circle their bases without compacting the roots. One specimen, nicknamed the Sacred Tree, is estimated at well over a thousand years old, and standing beneath it, craning my neck at bark thick enough to swallow a hand, I understood why the forest gets treated with something closer to reverence than tourism.
When to go: Spring and autumn bring the most comfortable temperatures for walking the longer trails. It rains often here regardless of season, so a light rain jacket is worth packing whenever you go.