Hualien

The river cut this gorge out of marble, so the walls run in white bands. Since the April 2024 quake the open stretches keep changing and Swallow Grotto is still shut, so check what is open that day. Where you can walk, helmets are handed out for the rockfall.

Shingle rather than sand, so the stones rattle as each wave draws back. The bottom drops away fast and the rip is strong, with warning boards the length of the beach; it is ten minutes from the airport, which is where a spare hour before a flight goes.

Mountains fall straight into the sea for more than twenty kilometres, the rock running hundreds of metres up. A few pull-ins on the Suhua highway serve as viewpoints, each with room for a few cars. Seeing it from the water means booking a dawn kayak trip.

A cycle path rings the lake in about five kilometres with next to no gradient. On April and May nights people come out for the fireflies, so signs along the path ask everyone to switch their torches off.

From mid-August into September the hillside goes orange with daylilies. The flowers are picked and dried for sale, so once harvest starts there are fewer of them and earlier is better. The road up is narrow; in season you change to a shuttle at the bottom.

Twenty-four kilometres by inflatable from Ruisui down to the river mouth at Dagangkou. Three or four hours. The rapids come one after another with no way to stop partway. The season runs April to October, though a high river cancels the day.

A village where timber workers lived under Japanese rule, left standing as it was. Wooden dormitories, a bathhouse and a cinema run in a row, with the trackbed that climbed into the hills still showing through the grass. No charge. Hardly anyone about.

Four blocks, one of them given over entirely to indigenous food, where the stalls sell wild greens and rice cooked in bamboo. It sits in the middle of town, yet wind comes off the sea across it and makes a summer evening bearable.

The wave-cut sandstone is pitted into a honeycomb, so the footing stays uneven all the way out. As the tide comes in every hollow fills and hundreds of small pools appear. Whale-watching boats work the water off this stretch.

Dairy cattle graze loose and there is no gate fee — what the shop charges for milk and ice cream does that job — and since the cows come right up to the rail, a sign asks you to feed them only what the shop sells.

A two-storey building put up in 1942 as a Japanese naval headquarters, ringed by pines more than a century old. From its hilltop, the upstairs veranda takes in Hualien harbour and the Pacific at once. Today it houses exhibitions and a tearoom.

Some twenty warehouses of the old Hualien winery, turned into galleries and workshops. The yard is wide, so weekends bring a market of indigenous crafts and farm produce, with small shows in the evening. Dongdamen Night Market is within walking distance.

Iron-rich carbonated hot-spring water that turns a yellowish brown once it meets the air. An inn still stands where Japanese-era police kept a rest house and bath. In the Wuhe tea fields nearby, a tower marks where the Tropic of Cancer crosses.

Wetland fed by groundwater beside an Amis village in Guangfu, named for the Amis word for the pigeon peas once common here. Guides show palakaw, a trap of layered bamboo and grass sunk in water to gather fish, and let you haul one up. Lotus blooms in summer.