Part 94: Treasure Hill... We arrived back in Taipei fresh from our hiking experience and decided to take it easy for a few days before the return to the Philippines, and there are fewer cities that I'd like to have time to kill than in Taipei. Aside from digging deeper into the culinary side of this great city, we explored some the creative hubs we had heard about. One of these talked about sites was called treasure hill. Now this was a place some of my graffit...

Part 93: Hualien..... We made the decision to head south out of the city to visit Hualien for a few days which was around 200 km from Taipei. So this was a good opportunity to experience the high speed trains everyone was raving about. Everything here was all about convenience, so once you get the hang of the language barrier it's easy to get around pretty much anywhere you want, and very cheap too. Soon as we got to the train station in Taipei and purchased ou...

Part 92. Jiufen... The hostel Lounge, or common room was really comfortable with its huge sofas, and in Jean the proprietor, we had the perfect host. She was a softly spoken eccentric character with a wicked sense of humour - I liked her straight away. There were a few house rules which we didn't mind, like no shoes and a curfew at night, but this was a great place to just hang out. She would play the cello or piano, and oil paint whilst the guests came and wen...

Part 91: Taiwan time... The cheapest flight I could find to Taipei was at 1:40am. Some people are not that into night flights based on the conversations I've had with other travellers - personally, I prefer them. For starters, aside from being cheaper, there is less traffic on the roads at the very least, and the airport is usually less crowded too. I'm saying usually because this is Manila we are talking about here - nothing is ever that straightforward. Als...