Huandao – 1000km around Taiwan
Hello there,
I spent the past three weeks skating 900 kilometers all around the island of Taiwan. The entire country loves cycling and some of the major bicycle manufacturers like Giant are from here. Because of that there is a ton of cycling infrastructure and one of the most popular cycling routes is Route 1 – the round island route, which I skated on this trip. Locals call this type of journey 環島 – ”huandao”, which loosely means “around the island”.
The route
Since bike touring is so popular in Taiwan you have a ton of resources available to help plan the journey. I spent a loooooot of 2020’s lockdown just watching Taiwan cycling videos on Youtube and reading blogs about the trip. Some of my favorites are here
Accommodation
On the west coast you basically go from city to city and as such there are a ton of options for accommodation. I tried staying in hostels or cheap hotels mostly to keep it budget-friendly. A bed in a hostel dorm room runs you about $15-$20 USD and a hotel room is about $30-$40. The thing about the west coast is that there aren’t too many people traveling around it as it’s honestly a bit dull and industrial. I’d often be the only person staying in the hostel during the middle of the week, which is a bit of a bummer as I didn’t really meet many people during this part of the trip.
Things get much livelier once you get to the south. Kaohsiung is Taiwan’s second biggest city and from there on I ran into a lot more people traveling around. It’s also a really really nice city for skating itself. You can cruise down the Love River and have a snack at their pier, which has tons of cool art and buildings. Peep it here.
A brush of virality
Heh, I gotta give an extra shout out to the On My Way hostel in Taitung. I arrived there after a long day of headwinds and beautiful views along the coast so I was a bit tired. The girl working there asked to take a picture of me and then we just chatted about my journey for a bit. Well, it turns out she was writing up my story to share it on their facebook page, which has about 20k followers. So that post blew up a bit over night with over 35k likes and went kind of viral on Taiwanese Facebook. Certainly not what I expected when I started this trip, but as a result of that I’d have multiple people pulling over to take pictures with me over the next few days.
The roads
Odds are that you’re reading these reports in chronological order, making this your introduction to the series (but I applaud anyone reading in reverse!). Odds are also that this is the first trip report about rollerblading 1,000 you’ve ever read. So let me explain what the situation on the ground looks like. As mentioned, I was traveling solo, often staying in hostels or cheap m/hotels to be nice to the budget. The upshot of those accommodations is that you don’t need to bring any camping gear, which would take up plenty of space and which, to be fair, plenty of bikepackers travel with. Instead, I managed to fit everything into a 42L backpack that I wore while skating. This is not the place for a packing list, but know that I still carried plenty of extraneous stuff, such as a laptop or winter clothes warm enough for a February in Hokkaido.
The entire setup looked varying ranges of ridiculous, depending on the context I found myself in at the time of observation. Call it schrodinger’s ridiculosity. Here’s a nice little mirror selfie from that first day. Relatively low on the ridiculosity scale, by nature of being mostly unobserved in the countryside.
Oh boy, where do I begin. So this wasn’t the first extended skating trip that I’ve done and I most recently completed the cross-country cycling path in South Korea (Seoul -> Busan) a couple months ago. That turned out to be an excellent experience (which I should probably write up as well) and gave me confidence for Taiwan. In South Korea you’re skating on cycling paths along the major rivers for about 600 kilometers. That set my expectations quite high for this trip…. And well that was a mistake.
For better or for worse, it didn’t take long until I realized that Taiwan would be an ENTIRELY different beast than Korea, especially on the industrial west coast. On the very first day the route drops you onto a mountainous highway without a shoulder (!!!). What a way to start the journey. As it turns out, this wasn’t going to be the only part that was on busy highways without shoulders. The very last day heading back into Taipei takes you on a similarly busy/sketchy mountain highway. In both cases I got somewhat lucky that I was skating them on weekdays when they weren’t as busy as weekends. I’d absolutely not recommend trying to go on those roads during weekends.
I’ve gotta say that I didn’t feel unsafe at any point, despite the lack of space. I don’t know if it’s the cycling culture, better drivers, or a mix of both, but cars and trucks would pass with a good amount of space and I thankfully didn’t have any close calls or sketchy moments during the entire trip.
The majority of the route (~80%) has a dedicated scooter/bike lane that you can skate in next to traffic. Even that’s not great as these highways (especially provincial highway #1 on the west coast) are EXTREMELY busy and littered with red lights. No joke, I can’t even describe how much time I spent waiting for red lights in the middle of nowhere, without any cross-traffic to be seen in weeks. I’ve read a bunch of people complaining about that on their trips, but just thought they were overreacting. Yeah in hindsight, fair play to them, I absolutely agree with that sentiment now!
The road surfaces were extremely smooth for the most part and the only downside was that you were right next to the cars and scooters, which are both quite loud. I didn’t really listen to music or podcasts on the west coast cause the traffic noise would just drown that out.
So yes, the West coast of Taiwan is essentially one really drawn out industrial city/suburb emulsion that’s only really interrupted by the mountains between Taipei and Hsinchu. As soon as you pass Chiayi be prepared for 3-4 days of scooter repair shops, factories, and gas stations along the ever so endless highway #1.
Wish I had seen:
https://www.bikeexpress.com.tw/2023/how-to-get-around-taipei-urban-area-by-bike/
Day 1: Taipei to Hsinchu
The night before I made final preparations and picked up some last-minute equipment from an extremely overpriced bike shop in Ximen that was littered with U.S. Route 66 signs. The $20 hex-tool was the headline purchase from that visit. At checkout the guy asked me what my plan was for that tool and I told him I was planning on skating around Taiwan. Despite speaking incredibly good English, he just gave me a blank stare and nodded without asking any further questions. I didn’t know it at the time, but that would become the default reaction whenever I told people anywhere about my skate.
It seems that the words rollerblading and around a country just don’t register as a logical pairing for most people. It must be so far out there that usually people just ignore the entire statement and move on, as if it’s risky to ask for more details or, worse, perhaps even embarrassing yourself that you did, in fact, interpret it as rollerblading around an entire country. Hopefully these posts will make you consider such long distance skates as a viable and incredibly rewarding way to explore the world. Maybe.
Early on the next rainy morning I made my way towards Songshan station, which is the official starting point of Route 1. Taipei has two large downtown train stations, one being Taipei Main and the other being Songshan. Unsurprisingly, I took the wrong exit and couldn’t find any hints of this supposedly famous route 1 cycling trail. Surprisingly, Songshan’s sister station is Matsuyama in Japan, which I’d just visited two weeks earlier, after skating the Shimanami Kaido. Small world; good vibes.
I applied the neon orange rain cover to my backpack, put on my skates, and set my maps app to Hsinchu. Technically there is an official route, even through downtown Taipei, but after snapping one last picture of a fog-covered Taipei 101, I just set out on one of the many parallel main roads towards the Tamsui river. Road conditions weren’t ideal and slippery at best due to the continuing drizzle. I almost started off with a skin-to-pavement encounter in the greasy Raohe night market street, less than a quarter mile from Songshan. Not soon after I became part of the homogenous mass of scooters that make up Taipei’s morning rush hour traffic. There was no winning here. Sidewalks were packed with pedestrians, food carts, cars, and who knows what else. Meanwhile the streets were densely packed with scooters, to whom I hadn’t accustomed myself yet. After an extremely sketchy hour through downtown I finally unclenched when I reached the Tamsui river trail and saw the official Route 1 sign for the first time.
The Tamsui river forms the border between Taipei and New Taipei city and it eventually splits into the Dahan river that goes well into Taoyang province. The route follows these rivers on a smooth cycling path for a while. Around lunchtime I stopped for a quick snack and bubble tea in Daxi old street. Happily refreshed and with a big milk tea in hand, I made it another 2 kilometres back onto the trail until I realized that the wind felt a bit too strong on my head. Turns out I left my helmet in a bakery on Daxi old street. Oops.
The next section turned away from the river and started snaking its way up the mountains near Guanxi. Much of the path follows the original National Highway #1 (these days just a country road) and didn’t have the most bike or skate-friendly lanes.
This was the first real climb of the trip and it hit me like a wall. Between the proximity of passing trucks and the general lack of space, this was a very abrupt awakening that skating a lap around Taiwan would be no walk in the park. At this point I was on the road for over four hours already, with about two more to go until Hsinchu and energy levels were lacking. Enter the (un)official hero of this trip, which comes in a radiant green bottle that I first encountered in a 7-11 at the top of this climb:
I’m still not entirely sure what this is exactly, but it tasted like (and played the role of) a refreshing sports electrolyte drink. 10/10. I probably averaged 1-2 of these a day after this discovery.
A long, drawn out, and for the most part, gradual downhill into the newly built Hsinchu city followed the climb. Going down a moderately trafficked mountain highway in Taiwan was not really what I had expected when I woke up that morning. Sheesh. That was only an introduction into what was to come over the next two weeks. Despite watching 99.999999% of Taiwan cycling YouTube throughout the pandemic, this still caught me by surprise. Guess people don’t find scenes like this appealing for their blogs (wish I could say the blur was intentional):
Thrilling stuff. Soon the countryside gave way to the newly built Zhubei City, which seemed like someone had just dropped a modern suburban Lego set here. Tons of new highrises and unidentifiable mixtures of malls, modern castles, and train stations.
Zhubei city came and went relatively fast but still left me puzzled of how it got there in the first place. After nearly six hours of pure skating time, I finally made it to Hsinchu city. So far I haven’t mentioned how nice Taiwanese people are, so here’s an example. While waiting at a light in front of a car dealership one of the salesmen saw me, somehow procured a Coca Cola, came running out the front door into the drizzle to deliver said coke directly to my hand, and disappeared again before the light turned green. What a guy and I can’t overstate how much these small acts of kindness lift your spirits on a trip like this. You’re your own route planner, transportation, support vehicle, hypeman, and everything else in one. It’s shocking how easily the thought of “oh it’s probably time to eat or rehydrate” gets pushed out of your mind by “fuck fuck fuck fuck please don’t hit me”, “what if somebody pulls out after this blind turn”, “will my wheels hold up through this downhill”, “how much further”, “will the rain stop”, etc.
My accommodation across the street from Hsinchu station after 58 miles on day 1. Did I mention this is a high-end luxury travel blog???
Changed from skates to flip flops in the lobby. Can you spot the salesman’s Coke?
I showered and gathered the energy to go find dinner in the night markets that are ubiquitous in Taiwan. The food in Hsinchu wasn’t anything super memorable but overall I was glad to have the first day in the books and was looking forward to doing it all again tomorrow, just hopefully without rain.
Day 2: Hsinchu to Taichung
So far so good. I woke up to an overcast sky but mostly dry pavement in the morning. Today’s route would take me directly onto Taiwan’s west coast for the first time after skating quite inland on the first day. Skating on the coastline meant one thing: WIND. On the west coast, those winds were thankfully big tailwinds all the way down.
The face of a man who realized that something important was left a kilometer behind.