You can say this for Taiwan – you certainly can’t get bored from a lack of experiences. Consider our range of activities in 72 hours in Taipei and the surrounding areas.

• Gorging on a variety of strange foods bought from street vendors for $.50, in nighttime street markets.
• Taking an elevator to the top of the world’s tallest building.  A 600 meter per second journey that goes 89 floors in 47 seconds.
• Taking a subway out to the Beitou Hot Spring, and getting in natural cold, warm and hot pools with 50 people who didn’t speak a lick of English.
• Wandering through a giant temple in the middle of a downtown park.
• Bussing out to a natural park on the country’s north coast.
• Taking a gongola ride up 2,000 meters to reach some temples, then hiking a few hours to find a nother temple carved into the wall of a waterfall.
• Nearly getting run over by one of the 198 million scooters that dominate the roads.
• Shopping at computer markets getting incredible deals on memory cards, USB drives and other small accessories.
• And then, eating more food from more night markets.

I’ll slowly get the pictures up to illustrate some of these activities, but the basic story is one of Taiwan being one of the most diverse places I have visitied.  After the fury and fervor of Hong Kong, Taiwan could easily be termed disappointing or unexciting.  But when you look at the wide range of activities, it really is quite a fantastic place.  5 million residents is nothing compared to Hong Kong or Tokyo, but it’s still a major city with more to offer than you can do in 3 days.  Plus, Taipei represents the very top of a long island.  There are another 18 million people in the rest of the country, in areas we didn’t even contemplate visiting.

When you consider how close it is to all the major Asian hubs, like Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc… it really becomes a place that could easily be the start and end points for my next Asia vacation.