Dispatches, plates, and field notes — filed from rivers, trails, and shops we close ourselves. Nothing here is sponsored. Everything here we'd take a friend to.
A 1-hour loop trail just behind Hualien city — wild Formosan macaques, the endemic Taiwan Barbet, a cool waterfall for foot-soaking, and a quiet indigenous renaming story most tourists miss.
Hualien has two well-known goose restaurants. Tourists go to one. Locals go to the other. Here's why A-Cheng Goose is the one to pick, and what to actually order.
It's just a Starbucks. But it sits inside a Hualien resort built around a 2.2km man-made canal, and the building looks more like a cottage than a coffee chain. Here's what it's actually like and whether the trip is worth it.