Getting Home

I got home on the evening of August 13th. This involved leaving Hong Kong at about 17:30, leaving Taipei at about 23:00 after a layover there, and arriving in Vancouver at about 19:30, all in local times on the same day.

Budget

The airplane tickets were about 1300 CAD. Expenses while away were about 1000 CAD in Taiwan and 370 CAD in Hong Kong and Macau (together), for an average of about 34.50 CAD a day in Taiwan and 46.25 CAD a day in Hong Kong and Macau. (I am excepting rough costs for the few gifts and personal items I bought.)

More details on costs are below. Note that 1 CAD is about 30 TWD and about 7 HKD.

Accommodation

I always stayed in hostels except when in Taichung, where I couldn't find a hostel in the city with a free bed. I didn't keep very good track of hostel costs, but I think a dorm bed in Taiwan averaged about 15 CAD for a night, with some at 12-13 CAD. Private rooms for one person (but equipped with double beds for two) were 600 or 700 TWD, or about 20 CAD, on the couple of occasions when I used them. The one hotel I stayed in, in Tainan, was just over 900 TWD. A quick look suggests that hotels in Taipei are much more expensive. The one hostel I stayed in in Hong Kong was about 16 CAD.

The hostels I used all seemed clean and safe enough to me. The staff all spoke enough English that I didn't have any problems. They usually seemed helpful without being particularly outgoing (possibly partly because of limited English), but in a few places (Puli Nansing Youth Hostel, Hostel Ibubunu in Taitung, and Amigos Hotel in Hualien) they went out of their way to help me work out what to do in the area.

At first there wasn't much social atmosphere in the hostels I stayed at; the first hostel in Taipei was fairly busy, but people mostly kept to themselves or in existing groups, and the hostels in Taichung and Puli were almost empty. However, in Kaohsiung, Taitung, Hualien, and at the hostels I stayed in when back in Taipei people seemed more sociable. Except for Taitung these hostels were quite busy, with travellers from a variety of places. This included a number of English speakers, so I found some people to talk to.

Eating

In Taiwan the most obvious, and probably the cheapest, places to eat were small open fronted restaurants and stalls. Most of these had regular menus (which were usually posted out front, which is basically what I mean by obvious above -- it was easy to work out prices), but some were buffets. The buffets charge either by weight or by some process used by the staff involving examining and poking at the food being taken, presumably based on the number and type of dishes.

Vegetarian restaurants are fairly common (at least in the cities I saw) and can be identified with 素食 or 卍 signs. However, they were infrequent enough that it can take a bit of searching to find one, and I sometimes found it impossible to find any open after the main hours for restaurants. There are often higher concentrations near temples. Some of the buffet places are entirely vegetarian. When I tried one of the non-vegetarian buffets it seemed easy enough to find some vegetarian options, but there was a little contamination from the meat dishes.

There are also convenience stores and bakeries for basic food. I found that buns and tea eggs from 7-Eleven were a good backup meal. At least in the larger cities (definitely Taipei) there are also some western style cafés, which I used for easily identifiable vegetarian options for the first couple of days. These seemed to have English menus (but not necessarily English speaking staff).

A meal at one of these small restaurants in Taiwan was usually 30-90 TWD. Drinks at bubble tea type stores were usually 30-60 TWD. Bottled drinks (in smallish bottles, maybe 600ml) were in the same range, but it was almost always easy to find options on the low end of that. Bottled water in 2l bottles was also in the 30-60 range (there was a standard price, but I don't recall what it was).

In Hong Kong the restaurants were more like those in Vancouver; they were less open and there were a lot more restaurants with western food. I didn't see as many explicitly vegetarian places as in Taiwan, possibly just because there were fewer Chinese style restaurants. However, there were some, again especially near temples, and I didn't have any problem finding vegetarian dishes at the other restaurants. Again there were convenience stores and bakeries for simple things. Food in Hong Kong seemed to be about the same price as in Vancouver. Bubble tea type places were a little cheaper than I believe they are in Vancouver, but more expensive than the average in Taiwan. I don't recall what bottled water cost, but I believe it was more expensive than in Taiwan. It usually was available only in sizes up to 1.5l, and there seemed to be only a couple (three, I think) brands in the city.

Food in Macau seemed roughly like in Hong Kong, but I was only there for one day and only bought food in a very touristy area.

Transport

Getting around locally was easy in Taipei and Kaohsiung because of the MRT systems. The rest of Taiwan was much harder because the only public transit was buses, and routes and schedules were posted only in Chinese. My guide book usually told me what to take, but finding out where to get off could be be trickier and once away from the city centres bus stops were sometimes hard to locate. There may be more English information about buses available somewhere, but it wasn't obvious. Local transit was always much cheaper than in Vancouver; for example, MRT fares in Taipei started at 20 or 25 TWD to get to an adjacent station, and from near the centre of the city the fares to the ends of lines were about 40 TWD.

Long distance transport in Taiwan was fairly easy on the train. Tickets could be bought from machines, and these always had English instructions. There were also a lot of long distance buses. These had the same disadvantages for me as the local buses, although routes between major cities were more obvious. For the long distance buses it was usually necessary to buy a ticket from an office by the appropriate bus company's station, but it also seemed to be possible to get on along the route; I never fully worked out the procedures.

Taxis were almost always plentiful in Taiwan, and there were always many around the main bus and train stops. In many places (especially outside of Taipei, for some reason) the taxi drivers were quick to approach me in hopes that I wanted a ride. This was sometimes useful even when I didn't want a taxi, because they seemed willing to point me in the right direction to get buses as long as they first got a minute to tell me how much faster their taxi would be.

I Taiwan I found it was useful to write down and carry the Chinese name and address of my hostel and current destination, to make it possible to get directions without having to find English speakers.

In Hong Kong local transport was good (see my post for Hong Kong), well marked in English, and also much cheaper than Vancouver.

Other Expenses

Attractions in Taiwan seemed cheep on the few occasions I payed for them. For example, visiting the National Palace Museum normally costs 160 TWD, and is only 80 TWD for students.

I priced some small electronics while in Taiwan, first because I needed an SDHC card to store photos and later to see how much cameras and music players were. As far as I could tell prices for brands I knew were about the same as Vancouver. However, I know nothing about how to shop there, and there were a number of smaller brands I didn't recognize.

Language

I didn't know nearly enough Mandarin to use it much, which limited communication a lot in Taiwan. Since all the hostel staff spoke some English the major place I needed to communicate was at restaurants. I got by just by pointing at reasonable-looking items on menus or by using buffets. As far as I could tell the smaller restaurants that I describe above tended not to have English menus, although the slightly more upscale ones (and also the bubble tea type drink stores) sometimes did.

Buses in Taiwan were very difficult since schedule and route information was in Chinese and not all buses had English stop announcers (some had displays inside to show the next stop, which did tend to include English). However, it was usually possible to get by by writing down the destination in Chinese and showing that to the ticket office staff (when necessary) and the bus driver.

In general people in Taiwan didn't seem to mind me not speaking Chinese, and were usually very friendly. The staff in convenience stores sometimes seemed a bit nervous about it, but I imagine that they may not have been too happy about their jobs in general. Store staff did seem to appreciate it if I at least thanked them in Chinese. A few people did want to talk to me even with very limited English or my extremely limited Chinese, especially to ask where I was from and that kind of thing.

It should be noted that there are actually a quite number of people in Taiwan who speak English in varying degrees. The problem for me was mostly in finding them. Additionally, the people running the small restaurants and driving buses seemed to usually not speak any. However, the few times I ran into serious difficulties communicating there were often people nearby who could help me.

In Hong Kong plenty of people speak English and I assume those who don't are used to English speakers. In the cases where I needed to communicate with people who didn't seem to speak any (especially in the smaller bakeries), I got by with the same techniques as in Taiwan.

Taiwan Youth Travel Program

There is a Taiwan youth travel program which offers several useful-sounding services for young foreign travellers. I didn't end up taking advantage of this except for getting the youth travel card and using it to get discounts in a couple of places.

Mostly I didn't take advantage of it just due to my own lack of planning, but I also found that instructions on the site and in brochures were not always very clear.

The main physical contact location they give is the Youth Hub in Taipei. When I went there the person I spoke to was helpful in giving me the youth travel card and other basic information but couldn't help me too much beyond that, mostly due to limited English. The building looks to be a general youth centre rather than being just for the travel program, so I imagine that helping foreign travellers wasn't her main job. For me having a contact who was either a better English speaker or who was just good at being welcoming (later I met some hostel staff and others who were good at this even without speaking much English) would have helped a lot.

Obviously helping inexperienced English-speaking travellers may or may not be a goal of the program (although their website gives me the impression that it probably is), and given that I didn't try very hard to work things out others in my situation might have more success.

Guide Books

In Taiwan I used "The Rough Guide to Taiwan". This is a pretty comprehensive book, and was extremely useful for getting around and deciding where to go. I chose it over the Lonely Planet book because it seemed to have more background on places and attractions. It also has good street maps for the areas it covers, which were often enough to find my way around. However, the maps don't give Chinese characters for street names, which made them much less useful in some smaller places (even the outskirts of the major cities) where there is no romanization on street signs. I didn't use the book too much for finding accommodation, because it didn't list very many options in each city (understandably, given that it covers the whole island) and the hostel booking sites were much more comprehensive, but it came in useful for that a couple of times. It wasn't too much use for finding food either, for similar reasons but with the added constraint that I needed vegetarian places.

In Hong Kong I used "Hong Kong Step by Step" (or possibly "Step by Step Hong Kong"), by Insight Guides. It is a much smaller book, and is structured as a series of tours in various locations (including a couple in Macau and one in Shenzhen). This seemed like a reasonable approach for the amount of time I was planning to spend in the region, and I ended up mostly following the tours. I imagine it would also be reasonable just as a list of highlights in each area. It includes small maps of each area covered by a tour and a larger pull-out map covering the centre part of the city in detail and the whole region in less detail. Again I didn't find the book useful for choosing accommodation, although I did sometimes follow its advice on restaurants.

Route in Taiwan

In Taiwan I chose to go down the west coast from Taipei first and then back up the east coast. It turned out that the east coast, and especially Hualien (towards the north) is well prepared for tourists, in some ways more than Taipei. The owners of the hostels in Hualien and Taitung (see above) both gave me advice on what to see and how to get there, and there was good bit of information available in English. Hualien has a relatively large number of hostels, and probably also some cheap hotels. The east coast is also a bit quieter than the busy cities in the west. Given this it seems like it might have been better for me, especially as an inexperienced traveller, to have gone down the east coast first to have an easier time at the beginning. On the other hand, the east coast made for a relaxing ending to the trip, and in a way I am glad I saw the west coast first since it seems more representative of the country.