We'd scheduled in another couple of days in Taipei before flying out to Japan, the next destination. We wanted to be in Taipei in good time, plus it's a good place to be on the weekends and we hadn't exhausted all the activities that Taipei offers visitors.

The journey from Hualien was a three and a half hour train ride on the slow train, and we were finally feeling a bit fed up of trains . The novelty had worn off. This one was over-airconditioned, and the footrests were broken and therefore in the way. Plus it was late by 20 minutes! Shocking.

On arriving into Taipei main station, we took the metro to a stop near our hotel, and checked back in. The receptionists seemed delighted to see us, and presented us with a postcard, of ourselves. Yep, they'd used the picture they'd taken of us before we left on Saturday 12th, and printed it onto a postcard. This caused us some merriment!

We headed straight out and headed north to the Taipei Confucius Temple. We hadn't been there long, and were enjoying reading about Confucius in one of the displays, when the place closed. So we went next door to the large and quite spectacular Dalongdong Ba'oan temple. This temple just kept going, and we climbed a building behind to get a view over the roof, complete with many dragons. We went to a cafe for dinner, drank more delicious tea, and enjoyed the atmosphere . After going back to the hotel, we decided to wander to the river's edge nearby. To get there, we had to circumnavigate a huge concrete wall, separating the road from the river. At least we thought we did, until we discovered a set of steps which took us over the wall and to the rivers edge. We peered at it for a little while and avoided getting run over by passing push bikes, before retiring for the evening.

On Sunday 20th, we headed out to the National Palace Museum, after getting breakfast/ lunch at a Loving Hut place. The National Palace Museum is renowned for having probably the largest Chinese artefact collection in the world. It apparently has about 700,000 articles, with about 1% on display at any one time. It was really busy in the museum. The visitor counter said there were 3000 people inside, and the place really isn't that large. We weren't allowed a bag or water inside. There's only so much weaving through crowds we could take, so we decided to limit our time there . We went to three exhibits. The first was on paintings, a lot of fairly ancient ones in Chinese style, which were awesome. We read a lot about Fan Kuan, who painted in the tenth and eleventh centuries. There were some of his works on display and, though the silk has turned brown with age, they were still pretty spectacular. Many of the other pictures on display were described as being in Fan Kuan's style.

The next display was on carved jade. We've never seen so much jade! There were weapons, decorative pieces, unfinished pieces, vases, 3000 year old complete necklaces, hairpins, figurines, and lots more besides. Our final display was on mirrors and mirror cases. The museum has so many items, it can do an entire display on mirrors. There were lots of decorative items, and even an obsidian Aztec mirror on display.

Another bus ride and metro ride later, we were at Taipei Zoo. Not for the zoo itself, but for the Maokong gondola . This was a half hour long, 4km long gondola ride up a series of hills, to a height of 300m for a lookout over Taipei city. On the gondola up, there were three teenage boys in the ride. They played paper, scissors, stone to determine who would have to speak to us first. It was really funny because they were so blatant about it. When we reached the top, it was sunset and we made our way to a teahouse, with a view overlooking Taipei city. We sat and watched the sun go down and the lights of the city come on in the distance. It was idyllic. We ordered a pot of tea which turned into a 14 piece tea extravaganza, with each item performing a specific function for the making of tea. We hadn't drunk so much tea since December 2014! It was awesome and a great way to end our Taiwan adventure.

The following day, we packed up, checked out, and headed to our next destination - Tokyo, Japan!

Taiwan was much better than we had anticipated . There was a great range of activities and we could travel in an affordable way. The trains were plentiful and cheap. There was a varying amount of good information, depending on the place. Many more people spoke English than we expected, which made it easy for us to get around, despite only knowing 'hello' and 'thank you' in Chinese. The food was a bit hit and miss, though luckily more hit than miss. We thought there was a general lack of consideration for the environment, with overfishing and damaged coral reefs in evidence.

Taiwan appears to be forward thinking about women and the rights of people who are gay, which is great. It has a world class health care and dental care system, so a good place to be if you get sick. There were so many ornate temples to see, from tiny ones in mechanics garages, to huge temples with surprise shrine after shrine after shrine. The tea was just sublime, and the range and availability suited us. Taiwan also appeared to be well organised and gearing up for tourists, with signposts in English, some tourist information available, easy to use transport systems, and lovely, friendly, curious and helpful people. (A friendly chap from the 7/11 in Taipei even invited us to a festival in Taipei.) It was a pleasure to visit. We didn't see many obvious (European/ Caucasian) tourists, though we know there were a lot of Chinese tourists there. We think it's a much underrated holiday destination and had a great deal to offer.