One of Asia’s most dramatic canyons was our ultimate destination on Taiwan’s rugged east coast, supremely photogenic yet easily accessible even for novice hikers like ourselves on Day 7 of our round-island journey by train.
Featuring the deepest marble canyon in the world carved through by raging white waters, Taroko is widely acclaimed as the most scenic corner -- as well as one of the most dangerous tourist destinations -- on the island of Taiwan. The geology is extremely unstable: recurrent landslides strike especially in monsoon season, and deadly rock falls are common with Taiwan’s frequent earthquakes, one of which (magnitude 5.5 at Chiayi) occurred 8 hours after our trek through a hard-hat-recommended tunnel.
This would be a bonafide UNESCO World Heritage Site if Taiwan were a member of the United Nations, except for the decades-long political standoff between Beijing and Taipei that has kept this natural wonder from becoming a household name outside of the island. You won’t read this in tourism brochures, but I highly recommend visiting while the pro-independence DPP is in power as the national park gets easily overwhelmed by Mainland Chinese tourists whenever diplomatic relations with Beijing warms up.
Spectacular sceneries abound from white marble rock faces polished by crystal blue streams to snow-covered peaks soaring nearly 4000m straight from sea level. Established as Tsugitaka-Taroko National Park by the colonial Japanese before WWII, Taiwan’s first ever national park actually boasts a summit taller than Mount Fuji.
Public transport to the national park was simple enough. We stayed at the local transportation hub of Hualien the previous night, bought our day pass for the Taroko Line Bus from 7-Eleven, hopped on Bus 1133A in front of Hualien Station in the morning and reached Taroko within 45 minutes.
Our first stop was the national park’s most popular trail, scenic yet evidently gentle enough for these elementary school children on their annual field trip. The only caveat about the Shakadang Trail was the lack of washrooms for a few kilometres, and that the only refreshments available came in the form of bottled water and grilled sausages from the local aboriginal tribe.
The trail head starts from the bottom of the unmistakable red bridge where the untamed Shakadang Stream merges with the larger Liwu River, a kilometre upstream from the Tourist Info Centre. Instead of completing the full 8.2 km round-trip to Three Huts, we decided to turn back halfway at Five Huts to strategically catch the hourly bus to our next stop of Buluowan.
This pristine utopia is the ancestral homeland of a toughened and once-feared tribe of aboriginals, known as the Truku and bastardized as Taroko by the invading Japanese in the 1910s. No longer known for their impressive facial tattoos and head-hunting rituals, the modern day tribesmen subsist on agriculture and supplement their income by offering refreshments to visiting tourists.
Signages of Indigenous Reserve Land mark the territory of a people once powerful enough to take on the Imperial Japanese Army, 2,000 tribesmen against the impossible odds of 20,000 soldiers armed with machine guns and artillery in the bloodiest conflict between aboriginals and Japanese colonists during the so-called Taroko Wars.
After subduing the Truku, the Japanese conceptualized a hydroelectric dam upstream along the Shakadang and proceeded to dynamite this path out of sheer rock cliffs as an intended service road. Well the Japanese lost WWII and retreated from Taiwan, the dam never materialized and the service road became Shakadang Trail in the expanded national park.
Within 40 minutes we reached the crystalline waters of Five Huts where the Truku tribesmen just started kindling their charcoal grill for some homemade wild boar sausages, available around noon for a reasonable TWD40 (CAD$1.7). Luckily we already picked up some sandwiches and tea-flavored eggs from Hualien, not wasting any time in returning to the trail head to catch the next bus to Buluowan.
But the National Park’s website lied.
Our original plan of picking up a recommended hard hat en route to Swallow Grotto was thwarted by 1) the fact that hard hats were no longer offered at Buluowan and 2) the closure of the footpath from Buluowan to Swallow Grotto due to recent landslides. Our blessing in disguise was the pictured panorama over the Liwu River valley taken from the Meander Cove Trail, a worthwhile diversion while we awaited the next hourly bus to Swallow Grotto.
The problem with Swallow Grotto was that the official bus stop was located at the eastern end of the grotto near the Zhuilu Suspension Bridge, requiring visitors to double-back along the stunning yet perilous cavern where fist- (and occasionally coconut-) sized rocks routinely drop from above with potentially fatal consequences. With safety in mind our friendly bus driver advised everyone -- mainly in Chinese but partially in broken English -- to remain on the bus at the official stop and dropped off at the far end of the grotto, at his own unofficial stop coined Yanzikou Middle in English.
Here we witnessed one of the narrowest sections of the Taroko Gorge, barely a few metres wide at places and several hundred metres deep. Seasonal waterfalls emerged magically out of vertical marble cliffs inhabited by swooping swallows, in landscapes right out of Chinese ink paintings.
Our pedestrian path was originally part of the Central Cross-Island Highway, ordered by Chiang Kai-shek in the 1950s to connect Hualien with Taichung on the west coast at the cost of 200+ lives. The grotto itself was tunneled out of the area’s highly unstable rocks, and entire slabs still sporadically come down to smother the unfortunate hiker, or an entire car in the case of the new vehicular road adjacent.
Which brings us to the fact that we still had no hard hat, certainly nerve-racking considering that rock falls at the nearby Tunnel of Nine Turns had become so epidemic that the trail was closed during our visit. Nobody got hurt that afternoon, and the next significant earthquake in the area would strike at 22:20 that evening.
At last we reached the official bus stop at Zhuilu Suspension Bridge, the dramatic entrance to an ancient footpath used by the aboriginals since time immemorial and now hailed by Taiwanese hikers as the nation’s most breathtaking and treacherous hike, accessible only with a permit from the national park office.
Our only regret on this day was that the Cave of Water Curtain, considered by the locals as the crown jewel of the national park, remained closed due to severe earthquake damages several years back. From the suspension bridge we returned to Hualien for a late lunch of noodles and some hard-to-find edible souvenirs, before continuing our counter-clockwise circuit of Taiwan.
IF YOU GO
Taroko National Park is easily accessible by the convenient Taroko Line tourist shuttle, also known as Bus 1133A connecting the national park with Hualien Station as well as the closer but smaller Xincheng Station. Day passes for the tourist shuttle can be purchased from the Hualien Bus kiosk next to Hualien Station or from any convenient store. Hualien Station is 2 hours from Taipei by express trains. If you're on a round-island trip like us, heavy luggages can be stored at the luggage room at Hualien Station.
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