The other was because both of our flight options to Southeast Asia stopped in Taipei.

In any case, we were not going to miss the opportunity to experience Taiwan’s most famous (and expensive) tea. The flavour – rich, crisp, yet delicate – is perhaps only eclipsed by the tasting ceremony that all purveyors go through before you would buy any tea. Nobody who knows anything about tea buys tea in Taiwan without a tasting.

Pouring tea from pot into serving pitcher

So it was with great pleasure that we found ourselves high atop Alishan, one of the most famous mountains and top tea-growing mountains in Taiwan. We were even more thrilled to find Lian Xing Tea Shop, and better still, with our new friends Janet and Sean to share tea with us. And translate.

Lian Xing Tea Shop

High mountain tea is grown at over 1200 metres of elevation, although the higher the tea was grown the more desirable it is. The tea we tasted on that chilly night in January was a brand new winter harvest (winter’s cooler temperatures yield more succulent leaves; spring harvests are more floral), grown at 1700+ metres. It is a variety of oolong, but the effect of growing at high elevation – cooler temperatures, clean air and an abundance of mist – changes the character from other oolongs grown at lower elevations. The result is a tea that is very crisp, yet it has a creaminess, a richness, that gives this tea remarkable complexity.

Pouring hot water into the tea leaves

All high mountain tea has whole leaves that are left intact. The better teas, though, do all of the picking by hand. The resulting harvest includes multiple tea leaves still attached to a stem or bud. When a machine harvests the tea, you get a lot of individual leaves. This makes a big difference to connoisseurs.

Used tea leaves, unfurled

The tea is made in small batches in a very small pot by western tea sensibilities. Usually, the pot sits in another dish that has hot water in it, which insulates the brewing pot. After brewing, the tea is poured into a serving pitcher, which serves two purposes. One is that it is easier to pour into the small teacups from the serving pitcher. The other is that the tea mixes, which results in uniform servings. The tea cups are also very small, sort of large thimbles. All of these pieces are typically beautiful, and often intricately designed or painted.

Wang Hui-Chuan conducting our tea tasting in Taipei at the Alishan Rinchu Store

The shop owners we worked with were all wonderful people who clearly loved tea and what they did. High atop Alishan we found Tu Lin Che running the Lian Xing Tea Shop and she conducted the whole tasting with a big smile on her face, even though it was the end of what was probably a long day. Perhaps it was because she doesn’t see a lot of white people come through with a passion for her tea, or maybe she was putting on an act for the sake of business. rIAm’s theory is that there were preservatives in the cool, crisp and fresh mountain air. Maybe it was all of those things, but it was obvious Tu Lin Che loved her tea, and I think she loves every chance she has to do a tasting.

Tu Lin Che pours the hot water onto the tea leaves

In addition to the elevation, weather and growing season, the flavour of the tea is affected by the processing methods. Based on grower preference, the elevation of the tea, or to satisfy a variety of tastes, different amounts of oxidation and roasting take place. The process begins by leaving the tea in the sun to dry. After initial drying, the tea is put into large drums and bruised slightly, in order to begin the oxidation. Then the leaves are coaxed into curling up into tight balls (seemingly by magic, but I’m assured there is a method). This process can be repeated several times. Typically, the amount of oxidation is fairly low in order to retain the natural crisp flavour of the tea, but some people enjoy the flavours of different amount of oxidation, and we tried some with 20 and even 40 percent oxidation.

Another feature of the high mountain tea is that it is meant to be brewed multiple times, and all tastings continue through until the tea has been fully experienced. Each brewing takes a bit longer and the character of the tea changes over time. Some people have favourite brew numbers; rIAm, for example, came to really enjoy the second and third tastings, finding the first was too crisp for her liking. The process provides ample time to learn a lot about the tea and the person serving the tea. Of course, for the vendor, it also give them lots of time to make their sales pitch (which was never aggressive).

This great tea can be found in North America; visit tea shops in your Chinatown, but know that it often isn’t easy and isn’t cheap (even in Taiwan). Often, like in Taiwan, it can be difficult to converse in English. It helps quite a bit if you can recognize certain Mandarin or Taiwanese characters (especially the ones for “high,” “mountain,” and “tea”), but unless you really know your stuff, it will be difficult to know the difference between a 300g bag that is $10 from one that is $40 from one that is $80 (note that in Taiwan, good stuff up on the mountain can be $25-$40 for 300g). This makes it likely that the $10 bag is bad quality or a fake coming from China; the $80 bag is probably the real deal, but still, are you getting your money’s worth?

If you’re not sure where to go, your local TenRen Tea Shop, is a good start. Be very clear about what you want and make sure you do a tasting before buying because then, at worst, you buy a tea you like.

The best place outside Taiwan I’ve been to is in San Francisco, the Red Blossom Tea Company (”Formosa Oolong” link for high mountain tea), and oh boy it is well worth a visit. There will be no language barrier, and the store is as elegant as the ones in Taiwan. They have a wonderful selection of teas from around the world, and excellent teaware, but their knowledge and selection of high mountain tea is unrivaled because the owner visits Taiwan – and the tea plantations – in order to buy for the store. Go, taste, buy, enjoy and learn more than you knew there was to learn. Or simply buy online.

Of course, you could also just hop the next flight to Taipei, get on board the extremely efficient intercity train to Chiayi, take the gorgeous narrow gauge train up Alishan (past tea fields), and then find the beautiful Tu Lin Che at her tea shop. I do recommend this option. Afterward, of course, find yourself back in Taipei and visit the Alishan Rinchu Tea Store (pick up some free samples in Alishan from the tea shop of the same name, if you like) where Wang Hui Chuan will navigate your way through an impressive selection of wonderful tea.

Tu Lin Che and her sister in their tea shop atop Alishan Mountain. If they could, I’m sure they’d say “Happy Drinking!”

Sometimes what we see just makes us laugh. Hope the same happens for you.

A travel note: We’ve really enjoyed Malaysia, especially Taman Negara rainforest (oldest in the world) and Pulau Pinang. On Friday we leave this wonderful palce (Georgetown, the capital of Pinang) and head to Thailand, specifically Koh Tao, for some beach bumming and scuba diving.

A couple more notes on photos: Some of the photos would benefit from some mild fixes in PhotoShop (or the like), such as the ones of Taipei 101 with a very gray sky. We don’t normally adjust our photos much, but since we’re stuck with what’s on the Internet cafe machines, we’re not touching up any of them.

Also, we put descriptions on most all of our photos on flickr, as it saves us from blogging about each item. So go through the photos and read those descriptions… and make comments, if you so desire.

Lastly, all the Taiwan photos we plan to upload from the road are now on flickr. We’re getting to Malaysia, but haven’t gotten too far (yet).

Cheers!

And our photos!

Finally, we found an Internet cafe with a pretty high speed connection. So we’ve uploaded lots of photos. We’re staying a few doors down (for about $5/night!) so hopefully we’ll be back to upload more photos before we head to Thailand.

Of course, there’s that little matter of gorging ourselves on the food in Penang… might get in the way of uploading photos. Mmmmm.

We’re staying at this great little guest house in the Chinatown here, a perfect location to check out the city of George Town, the capital of the Penang island. The people there couldn’t be nicer and the place is very clean and nice, considering it’s bargain basement prices. The place across the street is a pit in comparison, and we almost stayed there!

Later tonight we are meeting up with our friends from Penang, who we met in Taiwan when we visited Alishan.

You can click the photo above to get to more photos, or you can click here for all our Asia photos and here for Taiwan photos.

A (rather long) note about our photos: We are carrying two cameras, a digital SLR (Canon Rebel XTi) and the very compact Leica C-Lux 1. In general, rIAm uses the Canon and I use the Leica, but we trade often enough. We try to add as a tag the initials of the person who took each photo. We also try to give information through tags about where the photo was taken, but we don’t have the time to be completely thorough. You can see the date the photo was taken (we’ve adjusted the camera timestamp to our local time zone), as well as which camera was used in the lower right of the page displaying the photo. The main photo page shows the photos in the order they were uploaded (most recent first). We are trying to keep the photos in the sets in the order that they were taken, so if you want to view photos in the order we took them, that’s the place to do it. The Asia 2007 set is where every photo from the trip will be; other sets will include only subsets of all our trip photos (e.g. Taiwan 2007). To download a photo you need to sign into a flickr account (it’s free to sign up if you don’t have one, and can be linked to a yahoo account). Happy viewing!

Our week in Taiwan was jam packed, not entirely by design, but because once we got there and discovered things, we wanted to see more and more.

Our photos at Flickr document what we saw (all our photos will take a while to get posted as the Internet cafe connections have been slow). Here I randomly detail the impressions Taiwan left on me.

Driving from the Chiang Kai-shek International Airport, about 50 km outside of Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, I turned to j. and said,”This looks like Chinatown.” Indeed every Chinatown I have ever been to, including the roofed and compartmentalized Pacific Mall in Markham, Ontario, look like any of the towns and cities we visited in Taiwan. Mind you this is only a superficial similarity. Once I began to unearth what all the sites, roads, shops and vendors have to offer, I certainly knew I was not in any Chinatown in the western world.

Take for example the brightly lit shops with large plate glass windows, where a sprite Taiwanese girl in a miny skirt, legs sexily crossed, sits propped up on a high stool by a bar flipping aimlessly through a magazine. My first thought was “Is this Taiwan’s version of legalized prostitution?” The people who hosted us as couchsurfers in Taipei exlained these girls were simply selling betel nut, the large green seed-nut that many chew with fervor across Asia. I had previously heard something in the nut is addictive, hence its popularity, but regardless of why people chew it, it is popular. I am sure the Taiwanese girls framed by the large picture windows only add to the appeal of chewing betel nut in Taiwan.

Chewing the nut stains your teeth and mouth red, and many elderly Chinese show mouths coloured by years of chewing betel nut. Reddish stains and what look like lumps of red chewing tobacco litter the streets and sidewalks all over Taiwan; signs on the Taipei MRT (metro/subway) and national rail lines advise against chewing and spitting out betel nut on trains. We haven’t tried any betel nut yet, but I am sure we will have many opportunities to give it a whirl.

I should point out, that after experiencing the sexy girls in stores, we quickly learned that the Taiwanese are modest, restrained people. They do express individuality through high end fashion (see any store at Pacific Mall for what I mean) and amazing shoes. Everyone, even plainly dressed street vendors and elderly folk have interesting and fashionable shoes. I heard from our couchsurfing hosts though that shoe sizes above a woman’s size 7 are more expensive and hard to find. To j.’s relief I didn’t indulge in my shoe addiction while in Taipei, although I am tempted to advise all my friends and family who wear size 7 and smaller to travel to Taipei with empty suitcases to fill with shoes. After all, you can carry back 70 pounds of stuff per bag when you travel that far across the Pacific.

Although people did come across as reserved in Taiwan, a smile and a bow of my head did wonders to break the ice or simply let someone going through their daily routine of chopping off fish heads and fileting a fish that I was glad to make their aquaintance, even if I couldn’t speak the language to tell them so.

And despite this reservedness, it was not difficult at all to approach someone for help in finding our way, whether it was the right train or finding a bookstore. Even more amazing and delightful were how many people stopped what they were doing and led us themselves to places we had trouble finding. In Shin Kong Mitsukoshi department store (think Neiman Marcus or Holt Renfrew) near the tall and beautiful Taipei 101 tower, a young fellow working in the esquisite food court was scolded by an older woman who insisted he take us directly to the store section we were looking (an area for Taiwanese tea tasting and purchasing).

People who speak and understand English were few in Taiwan, the fewest I’ve experienced in any foreign country I’ve visted where English is not the national language. Put despite this barrier, we managed to communicate with people and find our way. We learned how to say hello (hi-hao)and thank you (xie-xie — “sh” followed by a short “e”) in Mandarin, the type of Chinese spoken in Taiwan. Our guide book had a small language section, which we used to try to pronounce the Mandarin Chinese version, however since Chinese is tonal and you need to get sounds right to be understood, we often just pointed to the Chinese symbols next to the transliterations to express things like “I am vegetarian.” Most often through a combination of gesturing, pointing, writing down numbers (they use the same number system as we do) and drawing rough sketches we were able to accomplish a great deal, even hold a whole conversation in the Ghia-i train station where we battered for a hotel room in a place we hadn’t even arrived at yet. The woman who haggled us about the hotel room was really the only aggressive person we encountered. Although she wrote down the price we agreed to on some official looking receipt, we didn’t end up staying at the hotel she was working for — and she found out because she asked when we ran into her as we were buying onward tickets from Ghia-i.

Ghia-i is one of two towns we visited outside of Taipei. Ghia-i is several hours south of Taipei,and although we explored it leisurely one early morning, we used it as a jumping off point for a trip to Alishan, a mountain famous for its oolong tea grown at high elevations and its stunning view of sunrise.

Amazing sunrises, sunsets, mountains and other natural wonders are in no short supply in Taiwan. The island is divided into east and west by a range of mountains that create a stunning backdrop as well as colourful destinations. Our photos document our time on a mountain railway climbing from 30 to more than 2000 metres up the famous Mount Ali, in Mandarin, Alishan (pronounced “ali – san”). We went from tropical, palm-tree landscape to alpine forest in just over three hours. Stunning doesn’t even begin to explain this ride on a narrow-gauge train. I still can’t comprehend how they even built the railway. It is apparently even more stunning in spring when the cherry blossoms are in bloom. We were happy though to go in low season when the train and hotels weren’t crowded with tourists. j. was particularly thrilled to taste and purchase copious amounts of his favourite “high mountain tea” ( gau san cha, in Mandarin) from the top of Alishan. Although the sunrise in wee hours was worth the trip, the trip up the mountain and seeing the tea plantations from the train, the mountain air and our time with two girls from Malaysia who translated so much from Mandarin to English for us were the highlights for me.

After Alishan, we headed to Hualien, our second stop outside of Taipei, the jumping off point to visit the most famous tourist destination in Taiwan: Taroko Gorge. Littered with marble outcroppings and a river winding through it, the gorge is 20 km of jaw-dropping views. Even more impressive is how the Japanese occupiers of more than 50 years ago and the Taiwanese after they left, built roads, paths and trails to access the very edges of this gorge. Although the Grand Canyon is bigger in every sense, being right down in the Taroko Gorge, and traveling it by mini bus and then walking it first in sun, and then a fine cool mist, really impressed upon me its size and beauty, something I didn’t get to feeling as strongly with the Grand Canyon because I didn’t get right down into its depths. I hope some of our photos give you even a small feeling of what we saw.

Amazing natural wonders and the cityscape of Taipei kept our eyes on high alert, but Taiwanese and Chinese speacialities kept our tongues titilated and on high alert for the best of every authentic Chinese food we love back in North America. We sampled dumplings, all handmade some from small vendors and some from the most famous dumpling makers in Asia, Din Tai Fung. One of my food goals was to sample the variety available at popular markets. We went to the most highly recommended in Taipei Shi-lin district, and marveled at the easygoing crowds and the array of foods to try, being prepared right in front of us. The skill of some of these cooks good rival a well-trained chef, and the foods we sampled were glorious. I will never forget the taste of the deep fried squid, covered in garlicy and spicy powders and accented with some lightly fried basil. Grilled squid basted with a sweet sauce, sesame seeds and hot chili powder also proved tasty. A whole roasted yam was filling and tasted perfect. There was plenty more we savored in Shi-lin and from other street vendors both at night and during our days. I will at some point need to make the time to describe each bit in detail. Suffice to say we took photos of nearly everything we ate, including a morning stroll through the food stalls of Ghia-i, where vendors plucked fresh chickens, sliced meat of every kind (and every part from hoof to organs), fileted fish and arranged beautiful fruits and vegetables. We really couldn’t help but eat local in Taiwan, even in season Taiwanese strawberries.

From the Taiwanese people to the island’s natural beauty to the best Chinese food I have ever had, Taiwan touched my heart. Things like the efficient and easy to navigate MRT (subway) in Taipei and the country’s rail service, shoes galore and hearing the language spoken at every turn simply added to my delight and interest. Perhaps arriving with no expectations in Taiwan just made every turn and encounter that much more interesting and inspiring. I will look to write more about my time Taiwan when it strikes me. For now, I hope I have piqued your interest about this island caught between the Republic of China’s forceful hand and independence. It captured my heart and I already long to return.

That’s the transliteration (from Mandarin) of the number one reason I wanted to go to Taiwan. We were asked by rIAm’s cousin if there was anything we needed to see or do on our trip. She didn’t mean things like see the Taj Mahal. rIAm wanted to see a rice paddy. I should have said I wanted to drink high mountain tea (gau san cha) on the mountain. And we did. And it was amazing.

High mountain tea is a type of oolong tea that is grown at 1200 meters and higher. The good stuff is picked by hand, and after going through an extensive process after picking but before consuming, you still end up with whole leaves, typically with a couple leaves connected at a common stem. The process involves varying degrees of fermentation, although our preference is probably 20-40% fermented. This gives the tea a nice roasty-richness taste and makes the tea leaves slightly darkened around the edges, which you can see after brewing. After fermenting outdoors, the tea goes indoors to be fermented some more and then roasted and dried. The tea leaves coil up into small balls.

Each tea shop always offers tasting. Nobody buys tea without tasting, and the tasting process is a wonderful ritual of its own. The tea is placed into a cup-like dish with no handle, or a very small teapot. Hot water is added but then poured off very quickly, typically into a bowl that the pot is resting in, and/or over the cups we will drink out of. This essentially rinses the tea, and then warms the cups and also keeps the outside of the brewing pot warm. Then fresh hot water is added to the tea and about 30 seconds later you are ready to taste the tea. The leaves can be brewed 6-8 times in this fashion, although it takes a little longer each time. Each brewing tastes a bit different, especially the first couple, and so a tea tasting always involves many rounds. Suffice to say, none of the tastings were disappointing!

At least for us, it was also customary to need a bathroom after a full tasting!

All of the tea we tasted was harvested this winter from Alishan mountain (ah-lee-san), and the one we liked best was grown at 1700m and higher. We sent a good bit home, so hopefully you can join us for a tea party sometime when we’re back in North America.

Our first tasting at a tea shop came in Alishan, at the Ali Mountain Lien Heng Tea Shop, run by the wonderful Tu Lin Che. This tea had a light and fresh aroma and was very smooth tasting. Each brewing was very nice, with no real bitterness. This experience was truly wonderful, and made possible by our first two traveler friends, Janet and Sean (shin), sisters from Malaysia who befriended us, helped us out, and went to the tasting with us, translating the whole time. The shop owner got a kick out of the two white folk who were so enamored with her and her tea, while the two Asian girls (of Chinese heritage!) were much less interested. We had a wonderful time; hopefully I’ll get some photos on flickr soon, but this connection is very slow for uploading.

We did several more tastings, in Alishan and back in Taipei, and each was wonderful in its own way. The beauty of this is that not only are we shopping for the tea we (ok, me) love, but we are getting wonderful experiences and interactions with local people. And while many foreigners enjoy this tea, not many white folks come looking for it compared to Japanese, Chinese or other Asians.

These experiences were also reflective of Taiwanese people in general. Always welcoming and gracious, they were happy to have us try their food and see their sights. I haven’t read rIAm’s notes yet, so there may be some overlap, but here are my highlights of Taiwan.

> Grilled squid at the night market is phenomenal. I mean, make-every-other-squid-I’ve-ever-eaten-taste-not-as-good phenomenal. And the guy preparing it is a wizard at making it come out just right.
> If every subway were as easy to use and as clean as Taiwan’s MRT, and all train systems as efficient and easy as Taiwan’s, people would stop driving cars.
> I wish there were night markets – or really, any markets – like the night markets in Taipei in North America. Shilin Chicago, anybody?
> Although some of the Chinese food we get in the US or Canada was on par with what we got in Taiwan, Chinese food has never tasted better than it did in Taiwan. Even the food courts were fantastic. In some ways, especially the food courts!
> Considering how little Chinese we could speak, and how little English Taiwanese people could speak, we communicated pretty darn well.
> There are more 7-11’s in Taiwan than there are in the USA.
> It’s kind of hard to believe how many scooters were on the road, and how fearless the drivers were.
> I could get used to bathing in hot springs. My body felt super refreshed after our time in the hot green-sulfur waters at Beitou.
> It’s kind of wild to see so many Western products, but even wilder to compare how those products are sold in Taiwan. Some companies fully translate their packaging while others don’t translate anything and a sticker with some Chinese on it gets slapped on the back of the package. And plenty of packaging with a mix of Chinese and English.
> Taiepei 101 might just be my favorite skyscraper, although it looks rather lonely in the Taipei skyline. (I’m writing this from Kuala Lampur, and I’ve now seen the Petronas Towers, and they’re only ok to me. Cool to look at, yes, but they don’t grab me like 101 did, or how the Chicago skyline always does.
> For those looking for a vacation destination, I really can’t recommend Taiwan enough. There are many amazing sights, sounds, and tastes, and they don’t require being as adventurous as you might think. Of course, there are plenty of things for the adventurous, too!
> I would enjoy, one day, going back to Taiwan. And it wouldn’t just be for the tea.

The subway is fast, clean and SUPER easy to use. The food is one amazing flavour after another. Dumplings and squid on a stick have never tasted better (fried and grilled… hard to decide which way squid is better here).

We had a very good flight… very long, but very smooth and easy… today we are off to Alishan for our mountain adventure and after that we go to Taroko Gorge. We’re back in Taipei later in the week.

Sorry, but we can’t download photos from this computer terminal, so you’ll have to wait for scenes of our first tastes of Taipei… so far I’m sure it won’t be a surprise to hear that the food has been the highlight!