Day 1: Taipei to Hsinchu

Location: Hsinchu

Time: 8pm

Weather: rainy 16C

From the moment I read about Taiwan, I knew I had to bike around the island at some point. Although I woke up to some pretty anticlimactic weather (gray, cold and wet) , nothing was going to take away my excitement.Epic bike rides start with Youbike (seriously this should be like the slogan for Youbike), so of course I started my Taiwan tour by Youbiking to Luzhou MRT Station. After getting lost, missing the bus and then getting off at the wrong stop, I finally arrive at the Frog Bike factory ready to pick up my rental bike. Frog Bike was started by a guy who one day decided quit his day job to bike around Taiwan, wrote a book about it, and has never looked back since. He started this initiative to sponsor other cyclists with rental bikes so that they can also find themselves through the cycling journey. Funny enough there are many stories like that in Taiwan, including the one of the Giant Bicycles founder, making biking around the country seem like a mystical rite of passage. They even have a special word for it, 环岛, which sort of loses its coolness when you literally translate it to "circumnavigating the island". So it was almost 11:30am by the time I actually got going, and I decided to scrap of my plan of going the inland riverside route and follow the bike mechanic's advice of just going straight down along the coast. 

I ended up taking highway 15 most of the way, which wasn't the most exciting but all flat and not too many cars, in other words, a perfect start for when I haven't been doing any training rides in preparation. More importantly, it had enough convenience stores (really gotta love them now!) to fuel up and rest every so often. It started drizzling some time in the middle but I didn't mind as it wasn't the kind of rain that gets you really wet. I didn't see any other bike tourists today but had three different vehicles cheer me on! I got to the outskirts of Hsinchu around 3:30pm and took quite a while getting into the city. While waiting for my host to come home, I had some meat balls and a really good steamed bun filled with brown sugar syrup at the stalls around the Hsinchu Chenghuang Temple, and watched some Beijing Opera. Chenghuang means City God and apparently this Chenghuang Temple is the highest ranked of all Chenghuang Temples in Taiwan, not really sure how the hierarchy works. 

There's not too much to do in Hsinchu, which is mainly know for its technology and science parks. It is however the oldest city in northern Taiwan and this gate, the only part of the old city wall that remains, has become a symbol of the city. 

There's no speedometer on my bike and I didn't want to drain my phone's battery by tracking, so I've just been relying on Google maps and signs every so often to check distances. With my much relaxed schedule this time, I have to say it is nice not fixating on speed and numbers at all.