Table of Contents:

• Taiwan As a Major Cycling Touring Destination
• Route No. 1 – The Around The Island Trip
• Cycling Counter-Clockwise
• The Island’s West and East Sides – Which is more popular?
• A Route No. 1 Add-On
• Getting To Taipei
• Bicycle Rentals
• Mapping The Route
• Accommodation
• YouTube Videos and Trip Reports
• Taiwan – Some Economic and Political Background

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Taiwan As a Major Cycling Touring Destination

Over the past thirty years, thanks in part to its success in everything bike-related, Taiwan has developed thousands of kilometres of bicycle lanes and bicycle touring infrastructure to encourage both locals and visitors to experience the island at a more leisurely pace.

In a week, I’m on my way to Taipei. I bought my EVA Airline ticket in late November and have been watching the weeks pass by as I prepare for what should be a memorable bicycle tour of what many say is Asia’s number one cycling destination. My goal is to cycle around the perimeter of the island at a pace of 15 to 20 km/hr, with a maximum daily distance of 100 km.

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 Route No.1-Huándǎo – Around The  Island 

The route I plan to follow will mostly be the famous Route 1, established in 2015. Starting in Taipei, it heads about 500 kilometres down the west side of the island to Kenting.  Then it is another 500 back to Taipei on the Pacific Coast, alternating between the Rift Valley road and the Pacific Coast road up to Hualien and Yilan.

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Cycling The Island Counter-Clockwise 

The generally flat terrain on the west side is why it is recommended to do the route counter-clockwise. It gives you some time to find your cycling legs before tackling the hills.

Another reason is that in April, the wind is usually still blowing from the NE.  However, when it’s time to head north again, it would be a bonus if the winds have shifted to the usual summertime SE direction! Paddling earlier in the morning is how Canadian canoe trippers deal with wind issues. I’ll see if it also applies to Taiwan on a bike!

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The Island’s West Side Vs. The East Side

The official Route 1 map above breaks the trip up into 9 days of cycling. I have set aside 16!  Some cyclists suggest skipping the west side completely. Since most of Taiwan’s population lives on the west side of the island, on leaving Taipei, you cycle through or around almost all of its major cities! From north to south – Hsinchu, Taichung, Tainan, and Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s second-largest city.

Organized bike tours mostly skip the west side of the island, spending most of their time on the island’s east side. This offering by World Expeditions, an Australian-based adventure travel company, has cyclists take the train from Taipei to Hualien, then cycle down the Rift Valley to Taitung, then be shuttled by vehicle to Shouka Pass, and finally ride mostly downhill to Kenting. The trip ends with a vehicle shuttle to Kaohsiung for an easy return to Taipei.

If the urban, factory, industrial-scale animal agriculture, stoplights, and traffic-heavy terrain gets to me, I may skip some of the west side by hopping on a bicycle-friendly train for 100 km or so. I’ll see how it goes.

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A Route No. 1 Add-On – Kenting 

One addition I’ll make to the usual Huándǎo (the Pinyin or Romanized version of standard Chinese 環島 meaning “around the island journey”)  route is an extension to the very southern tip of the island at Cape Eluanbi. I’ll spend an afternoon and an overnight in the beach town of Kenting first, then head over to the cape.

I’ll be at the south end of the island on one of Taiwan’s two official and hectic long weekends – the early April long weekend when the Taiwanese celebrate Children’s Day (Thursday) and Tomb Sweeping Day (Friday) on top of the usual weekend. Accommodation was already scarce in late January! I ended up booking rooms for the Thursday to Sunday period to make sure I had a place to stay.

On Day 8, I  head over the mountains via the 460-meter  Shouka mountain pass to the east coast.  It may take me a bit longer than the 2 hr. 20 min. that my Ride With GPS map app calculates!  One reward for doing the 35-km climb to Shouka Pass is the 15 km downhill to the Pacific! The other reward is the splurge on a B&B accommodation with a bit of beach to walk on!

Then I have eight days to get back to Taipei and my room at the Hotel Papa Whale in Ximending.

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Getting To Taipei From Toronto

The original plan was to take my Miyata GT600 touring bike to Taiwan.  That made a direct Toronto-Taipei flight essential. It would mean the bicycle would only be loaded and unloaded once, and therefore more likely to arrive undamaged!  The one direct flight I found was with EVA Airlines, Taiwan’s national carrier.  Skytrax has awarded it a 5-star rating for the past nine years. (No North American carrier rated more than 4 stars.)

At about CAN $2000, it was a competitive price. There were cheaper options; one was $400 cheaper but required a stopover in Hong Kong before a connecting flight to Taipei.  It also added hours to the travel time and would provide baggage handlers with another couple of opportunities to mangle the bike!

In the end, however, I decided to leave my touring bike at home! The cost and hassle of getting it to the airport in Toronto, getting it from Taoyuan Airport into Taipei and then doing it all over again at the end of the trip  –  well, just renting a bike there made more sense.

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Bicycle Rentals

Online trip reports led me to MatthewBike in Taipei. Reviews are very positive, and the price is quite reasonable.  The bike shop provides bicyclists with everything they need to do a multi-day bike tour.

For CAN$350. (which included a $50. deposit) I got a Surly Disk Trucker for 16 days. With 700c wheels and 27 speeds, including a reassuringly low granny gear, the steel-frame bike is a touring classic, right up there with my Miyata GT600.

Instead of the drop bar, the shop has installed mountain bike-style riser bars on their Surly bike. It will be my first time on anything other than the drop-bar style. The resulting more upright position may even make the ride more comfortable as I pedal along in non-race mode!

This screenshot from the bike rental website lists what else is included in the rental –

I will be bringing my own helmet, SPD pedals, a handlebar bag, my own panniers, and a cable lock.

Along with the bike and accessories, MatthewBike provides its customers with a list of bike shops around the island where they can take their rental bikes if they have any mechanical problems. Police stations along the route have also been set up to provide cyclists with basic repair tools.

Post-trip comment: MatthewBike was 100% reliable and fantastic. Add my name to the list of people pleased to have rented their bikes from them.

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Mapping The Route

The MatthewBike website has loads of information on various bike routes, including Route #1.

Another excellent source of route information is Bike Express Taiwan.

As its website header makes clear, along with downloadable maps and other cycling information,  the primary focus is bicycle rental.  Online reviews are very positive. Unlike Matthew Bike, Bike Express does not have a store front and delivers rental bikes directly to customers.

I downloaded the Bike Express Taiwan GPS tracks into my Ride with GPS app, which will serve as my route navigation tool.  The map segment below shows my day 1 ride from the Ximending area of Taipei’s Wanhua District to downtown Hsinchu and the H.M. Hotel. [Hsinchu is where Taiwan’s TSMC and other computer-related companies are based.]

Click on the map to access the interactive map and zoom in for more detail.

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Accommodation

Using the Booking.com app, I have booked accommodation for the first eight days of the ride.

• On the plus side, I set off each day knowing I have a place to stay and an additional reason to get there since I will have already been charged for the room!
• The one negative is that this boxes me in and makes changing plans more difficult.

Once I reach the East Coast, I will just book the room the night before – or even when I ride into town.

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YouTube Videos and Trip Reports

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of YouTube videos posted by cyclists who have done a fantastic job of documenting their Taiwan cycling trip, some featuring superb still photographs, amazing video clips, and drone clips. You’re left wondering how they managed to do all that while still on a cycling trip! It also leaves me wondering if another trip report is even necessary!

In February, the Globe and Mail published a short article about a Canadian couple’s bicycle trip in Taiwan.  It makes for a good introduction and provides some valuable tips for someone looking for a fantastic cycling destination that has somehow escaped their consideration.

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Taiwan – Some Background

Economics

The island nation of Taiwan (officially the Republic of China) is best known today for its semiconductor technology, with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) producing 90% of the world’s most advanced chips. Even larger than TSMC, with triple the revenues, is Foxconn (i.e., Hon Hai Precision Industry), the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer. It alone employed almost 700,000 people in 2024, many of them in mainland China, producing iPhones for Apple Inc.

Taiwan currently ranks 21st in nominal world GDP (list here), an indication of the high standard of living its enterprising citizens – about 23 million in 2024 –  have achieved in their country. In the list above, the IMF projected Purchasing Power Parity GDP per capita for 2025 would put it in the top 15.

Politics

Along with economic success, the past thirty-five years have seen the island’s citizens embrace democracy and an increasingly pro-independence stance towards the People’s Republic of China PRC). [See here for a primer on Taiwan’s 75-year road to democracy.]

The island is located about 150 kilometres offshore from the Mainland, where the authoritarian rulers in Beijing claim the island as a province of China. It was to Taiwan in 1949 that the government of the Republic of China and many refugees fled after losing the civil war to Mao Zedong and the Communist Party. To make its point, the People’s Liberation Army has been conducting increased naval and aerial military “exercises” around the island as a prelude to a threatened invasion if Taiwan continues to refuse annexation or “reunification”.  Here is Reuters’ news coverage of the latest episode from today, March 17, 2025. It is just the latest in an escalating series of provocations.

In the 2024 Economist Democracy Index, Taiwan ranks 12th. Here are the nations that Taiwan shares the top ranking with –

Meanwhile, the People’s Republic of China ranked 145th. See here for the authoritarian regimes it shares the bottom of the list with.  Hong Kong’s fate in the past five years provides a clear indication of what Taiwan can expect if Beijing’s current rulers take control of the island.

[Note: The USA ranked 28th and was categorized as a flawed democracy. In 2025’s Index, it will undoubtedly drop by 20 or 30, thanks to the authoritarian impulses of the Trump regime.]

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A Bike Ride Around Taiwan: Part 1 – The West Coast

A Bike Ride Around Taiwan: Part 2- The East Coast

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Next Post:  Post Jet-Lag in Taipei

Taipei – Km 0 of My Round-Taiwan Bike Ride