CC Travel Blog

Mar, 2008
It takes a couple hours by train from Taipei to Hualien. The train system in Taiwan was easy to follow and hard to miss. The train ticket came in two parts, a bigger portion and a small stub. The small stub can be inserted in a slot near the seat so that when the passengers falls asleep the conductor can still check the ticket without waking them up.

Hualien is a big city in the east coast of Taiwan and in my opinion, a good place to shop for east coast souveniors. There are a few attractions nearby, but if time is short, they can be skipped without much harm.

We visited Coi Pond (鯉魚潭), Shaofung Ranch (兆豐農場), an old lumber village (林田山), Guangfu Sugar Factory (光復糖廠)。 Coi Pond was just a lake with a fish farm hetching fishes. The pond was said to be a volcano in the past; after eruption, the land sunk in and water started to be collected.

Shaofung Ranch was good for family with young kids as it has quite some animals like a zoo. The fresh dairy products such as yogurt was EXCELLENT!!! Given the size of the farm, it could easily be a day’s plan inside. It took us an hour and half for two fast walkers to finished one loop, in sweats.

Fresh dairy products we bought.

The lumber village became a wood art museum and Guangfu Sugar Factory was a closed factory facility selling ice cream to tourists. If you want to go out to these places, either renting a taxi or joining a local tour are the ways to go. I would recommend renting a taxi because it is cheaper and more flexible. The local tours are not cheap and usually it takes a few tours to see all the above mentioned places.

A couple things I would suggest to do at Hualien for shopping and eating:

1. Shop or try the wine, especially fruit and rice wine. The aboriginals in Hualien are good at making wine from rice and it tastes sweet like dessert wine even though it has high concentration of alcohol.

Fruit wine is also delicious produce that can’t be missed. Lavender, cranberry, rose, all different kinds of flowers and fruits can be made into fragrant sweet wine.

2. Check out the night market for street food. Steamed buns seemed to be popular in Hualien and they taste good!

This store was at the corner of the night market, very easy to find and the steamed buns were execellent! Although the skin was not as thin as “Ding Tai Fun”, but the buns were very juicy and meaty inside.

The other famous local snack to try is some kind of sticky rice cake (痲糬). The tradition came from Japan but the fillings are quite different. Besides the regular red bean paste, the fillings have variations such as fruits, yam, taro, jam, peanuts, and other savory flavors.

The famous brand for the sticky rice cake. They had a store/museum near the train station selling all kinds of rice cakes. Free samplings were also available.