by Montana Meeker
Introduction: What is a Huandao Journey?
The phrase “Huandao” (環島) literally means “around the island”, and refers to the practice of traveling around the entirety of the island of Taiwan. To embark on a Huandao in Taiwan is to participate in an old and cherished patriotic tradition, often used as a rite of passage by Taiwanese locals. The Huandao tradition is documented in numerous movies, including the 2007 production “Island Etude” which details one Taiwanese man’s bicycle journey around the island in seven days, and several other independent films, all of which document different Huandao journeys through the lens of exploration of geography, culture, identity, and nationality. I first learned about the Huandao when I began my Master’s program at NCCU in Fall 2023.
▲ Departure From Taipei
Because there are no real rules for how exactly one must complete the Huandao tradition, there are a multitude of ways to participate. When I asked my friends, host family, and colleagues at NCCU about the activity, I was told many stories about their own Huandao journeys by car, scooter, train, and even bicycle. Some people went as quickly as they could, aiming to finish the journey in as little time as two days. Some people took up to a month, slowly traveling from place to place, and interspersing their journey with sightseeing, hiking, and relaxation. Some people went solo, some went with friends or family. Some included volunteering goals in their Huandao, such as cleaning up garbage from nature along their route, and some people included fun personal objectives for each city they visited related to food or tourism hot spots. Whether it turned out to be “high grade fun” (mostly a challenge) or more of a peaceful vacation, everyone recalled their adventure fondly, and I resolved to go on my own “rite of passage” Huandao journey before I graduated from NCCU.
Preparing for the Huandao
When deciding how I wanted to undertake the Huandao, there was only one answer for me personally: by scooter. Public transportation in Taipei is among the best in the world, and a scooter is really not necessary to get around, but I love driving my own scooter as a form of immersion in Taiwanese culture. In a full-face helmet and neon blue rain suit amidst a pack of other scooters, I don’t feel like a “waiguoren”, I feel like I really belong in Taipei. Moreover, learning to navigate Taipei traffic in the hopes of one day driving around the whole island provided a pleasantly objective goal to work towards in contrast to the more subjective everyday challenges of expat adjustment.
After more than a year of driving practice in Taipei, I felt prepared to take on the rest of the island. [Note: It is a long and complicated process for foreigners to purchase and register a scooter, learn to drive safely, and get properly licensed in Taipei. I would not recommend exchange students try this - cycling or renting a car would be a much more feasible way to complete a Huandao in a short time frame.] As I would be travelling solo, I planned to complete the trip in eight days over the Lunar New Year holiday in late January. I decided to drive counter-clockwise around the island, beginning from Taipei and heading down the westernmost side of the island towards Taichung first before coming back up from the southernmost point. This is something my host family recommended because driving counterclockwise positions the driver closest to the ocean and offers the best view.
Day 1: A Cold and Stormy Beginning - Driving from Taipei to Taichung
On a rainy Saturday morning, I began the Huandao. Due to miserable weather conditions, I did not stop much on the first day’s drive, traveling fast along the coast through Taoyuan, Hsinchu, Miaoli, and Taichung. The skies cleared a little as I approached Taichung, and I paused my drive to watch the sunset on a coastal beach outside the city. I arrived well after dark, and spent the evening wandering through Fengchia Night Market. My total driving time on Day 1 was six hours.
Day 2: A Visit to Sun Moon Lake
I began my day in Taichung with some delicious fried red bean donuts and a barbeque rice ball from local vendors. Full of food and well-rested, I left Taichung to drive inland to see Sun Moon Lake. When I arrived, the weather was perfect, and I joined the Lunar New Year crowds going up the gondola to get the best view of the famous lake, widely considered one of the greatest natural wonders of Taiwan. I felt so blessed that the sun was out and I could see the full beauty of the lake.
I continued my drive, hoping the weather would stay clear so that I could watch the sunset in Chiayi. Unfortunately, the rain began again, clouds blocked the skies, and temperatures dropped. It was so bitterly cold that I had to stop several times to warm up in convenience stores along the way to Chiayi. Once in Chiayi, I ate a hot dinner of traditional fish head soup and turkey rice at the famous SMARTFISH restaurant and then continued driving, arriving in Tainan late at night. My total driving time on Day 2 was seven hours.
Day 3: Trying Traditional Foods in Tainan
Exhausted from the previous two days, I took it slow in Tainan. Because Tainan is famous for having an excellent traditional food scene, I spent the morning trying local foods such as fish ball soup, pork lard egg yolk rice, and fried rice cakes, and explored Shennong Market and the Chikan Tower. I finished my Tainan food tour with some fried sugar mochi snacks from a street vendor, and visited Tainan’s Gold Coast beach before completing the short three hour drive to Kaohsiung.
Day 4: 新年快樂 (Happy New Year) from Kaohsiung!
My arrival in Kaohsiung coincided with the beginning of the Lunar New Year, and I began my visit to the city with a trip to Sanfeng Temple, a beautiful temple that was renovated in the 1970’s and is open to the public. I watched the sunset at Sanfeng Temple and ate Indian food in the city center because everything was closed while everyone was at home observing the Chinese New Year with their families. I saw a dragon dance to celebrate the holiday, and cycled the area around Love Pier. I took a break from driving on Day 4 and woke up ready to return to the road on Day 5.
Day 5: The Southernmost Point of Taiwan
On Day 5, I visited Shoushan (“Monkey Mountain”) to see the famous monkeys living in the jungle foliage on the mountain. After the monkeys tried to steal my belongings off my scooter, I decided I had seen enough and traveled to Sizihwan Beach before leaving Kaohsiung. I paused my drive to have conversations with a few other foreigners I met along the road who were completing their own Huandao journeys. Everyone was very encouraging, and offered advice on things to do and see along the path. Most impressively, I ran into a group of cyclists at a rest stop who were on their eleventh day of travel and quite happy to be approaching the southernmost point of the island. The lunar new year crowds were out in full force, and I made friends with a family driving home from Kenting while we were stuck in a traffic jam together. The family rolled down their window so that I could say hello to their very cute baby, and asked where I was headed. While initially I had been concerned about delays from the mass migration of people during the holidays, I ended up being grateful for their company.
Later that day, I drove to Kenting and reached the southernmost point of the island. Running high from the knowledge I had made it halfway, I watched the sunset from the area’s famous Baisha Beach. My total driving time on Day 5 was was just three hours.
Day 6: The Long and Dark Road to Taitung
Perhaps feeling too accomplished from reaching halfway point of my journey a day prior, I made a grave mistake on Day 6. Instead of following the coastal road (Highway 11) from Kenting to Taitung, I had the bright idea to try driving on the inter-island road for a portion of the Huandao. I planned to drive north on Highway 20 through the area encompassing Yushan National Park until I reached Taitung. Naively, I assumed that although Highway 20 went through Yushan, no permits would be required to use the road itself. So I drove for three hours through the beautiful Maolin National Scenic Area, only to be stopped when I finally arrived in Yushan and was informed that the roads were closed to everyone without vehicle permits. This was a predicament, because when I arrived at the Yushan area, there were only two hours of daylight left, and my mistake meant that I would have to retrace my path all the way back to Kenting in order to reach Taitung. The roads were winding and small, punctuated by sharp turns and sheer drops. My scooter’s headlights were no match for midnight in the mountains, and I was driving less than 20 kilometers per hour just to make sure I didn’t go off the road.
I don’t think I would have safely made it out of the mountains if I hadn’t made a friend who happened to be driving the same route. We didn’t speak a single word to each other, but drove at the same speed through the darkest portion of the road, neither passing, and waited for each other when the other paused to take a break or shake out a cramp. We drove together until we made it out of the mountains and onto the less poorly-lit coastal roads headed towards Taitung. At 1:00 AM, I arrived at my hostel in Dulan. My driving time on Day 6 totalled eleven hours.
Day 7: Rainy Rice Fields and Mountain Views in Dulan and Chishang
I woke up the next morning in Dulan, still exhausted, to torrential rain. I drove in the rain to see Paradise Road and the Chishang rice paddies, which a friend told me was an area where the Taiwanese military conducts training exercises. Due to the downpour, I drove quickly onward to Hualien, arriving at the end of the day after about six total hours of driving. In Hualien, I visited Dongdamen Night Market for a scallion pancake and some shaved ice before going to bed early.
Day 8: The End of a Beautiful Journey
On Day 8, I woke up to sunny skies, full of hope for the end of my journey. I left Hualien without incident, stopped at Qixingtang Beach to take photos, and drove by the closed entrance to Taroko Gorge. I followed the coastal roads all the way up past Taipei to the easternmost point of Taiwan. After stopping there for a while to watch the fishermen, I continued my journey to Keelung and then drove the last three hours back down to Taipei, at which time the skies opened again and it rained so hard my (supposedly waterproof) phone died and refused to function for the next several hours. I arrived in Taipei waterlogged, frozen, and victorious. My total driving time on Day 8 was about six and a half hours.
Conclusion: There, and Back Again
As I finished the Huandao, I found myself wondering “why” I was 8,000 miles from my home in Texas, alongside dozens of other people, both local Taiwanese and fellow foreigners, with the shared goal of circumnavigating Taiwan for no practical reason at all. And it struck me that we were driving in a circle for the same reasons humans have explored anything, anywhere, at any time, in spite of the fact that most journeys of exploration end in the same place they started. At the easternmost point of Taiwan, I sat in the sun among fishermen casting off from the ruins of a chemical plant, and listened to a speech delivered in my home state of Texas decades earlier - John F. Kennedy’s 1962 speech in support of humanity’s ambitions to someday visit the moon. I have copied a portion of its transcription below.
“But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic?...We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, [and] one we are unwilling to postpone.”
For me, completing the Huandao felt like visiting the moon in a way: the journey was the symbolic completion of my grand ambition to explore a new world overseas. In my mind, this trip began years before my eight days of driving - back when I first had the crazy idea to leave everything I had ever known and come to NCCU and Taiwan for graduate school. It was a powerful reminder that the greatest meaning of most adventures is found in the journey: we go far to someday go further, and we grow to meet the challenges we were too small to face before.
