Part V: The cross island Highway (Highways 8 and 14)

A Guide to Road Tripping in Taiwan's East Coast: Intro

Part I: Preliminaries and Advice

Part II: East Coast Highway (Highway 11)

Part III: East Rift Valley (Highway 9)

Part IV: Taroko National Park

Part V: The cross island Highway (Highways 8 and 14)

After crossing the Taroko NP (see Part IV), highway 8 gets steeper and steeper. Landslides are apparently very common and we experienced several delays due to them so allow for a lot of extra time. Basically you get to a point in the road where all cars are stopped. Normally, only one lane is open and you have to wait a bit until the cars in the opposite direction go through. Sometimes no cars might be going through for a while. But you can take pictures while you are stopped, so for us it was fine.

The next attraction is Hehuan Shan, which you can actually hike from the road. It is just before the mountain that Highway 8 turns into Highway 14. When we passed, the weather conditions were terrible so we ended up just taking a photo at Wulai Pass, supposedly the highest road pass in East Asia.

Our next destination was Puli. Before Puli, there is a very touristic stop called Cinjing, where there are some farms where you pretend you are working in the country side. For us this was uninteresting but we saw many tour buses and self driven tourists there. The theme seemed to be swiss alps which was weird, but the climate and landscape can remind one of the Alps. The views are amazing.

In Puli we were curious to check out a big temple whose architect was the guy who designed Taipei 101. This was not interesting at all, maybe the outside is ok but inside it feels very tacky and overly ostentatious which is weird if you think this is a Buddhist sect.

We then drove to Sun Moon lake one of the major tourist attractions of Taiwan, which can sound daunting but if you use simple rules of thumb you can enjoy thoroughly. More on that for another time!