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Time for Taiwan

— Part One —

By Luke Beard

May 19^th, 2016

Longshan Temple

I’ve traveled a little bit over the past few years but Asia has never been on my radar until now. In a very lucky stoke of opportunity, I was offered the chance to to join some of the fine team from Eat Drink SF and Cynthia Linh of the Violet Fog to shoot photos and explore Taiwan for a week.

I had no real expectations apart from the fact Taiwan is quite small. For comparison California is 167k square miles and Taiwan is nearly 14k square miles. In 6 days we traveled all over the island on a whirl wind tour to experience as much as we could and it turns out Taiwan is a very beautiful country.

I like to take photos more than I like to write words but thankfully @cyneats (A.K.A Cynthia Linh) wrote an excellent post from the perspective of “Tips for first time travelers to Taiwan”. It’s great and you should totally give it a read here.

Below is a series of vignettes and my attempt to capture just how rad Taiwan is. First off, dumplings…

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Chiang Kai-shek Memorial

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Taipai street finds

Follow me at @lukesbeard on Instagram for a few more photos not in this story.

KAVALAN Whisky distillery

Kavalan is Taiwan’s first and most popular whisky producer.

Sy Water 勝洋水草休閒農場

An eco-farm in Yilan County.

Pingxi

A small town famous for it’s awesome lantern lighting experience. Fun fact: The whole thing happens on an active train track and people casually just step out of the way of big gnarly trains like it’s nothing.

MIYAHARA 醉月樓

A ridiculous Ice-cream and candy store in an old eye examination building.

Jiji Temple

In 1999 Taiwan was hit with a 7.3 magnitude earthquake. The epicenter of the quake was a township called Jiji (“come together“). Wuchang temple collapsed and was left that way as a reminder of the quake. A new temple was built right in front of it.

The temple was one of my favorite things on the trip and I highly suggest visiting. Here is a map just in case.

More to come

Part two of my trip will be published next week and if you would like to stay in the loop you can subscribe to my stories below. No spam, just stories.