This is my series on our 2018 Round the Island World Schooling Trip. For more post, you can check out the index page or subscribe to my Facebook page. You can also subscribe to my Instagram for pics.
The last time we were in Taiwan for 3 months, I kept saying I wanted to go around the island, but we never did. Because, you know, a whole day with kids means I’m so pooped by the end I can’t think straight and seek solace in kdrama instead.
I learned my lesson and this time I subjected Fleur to some detailed advanced planning, pulling out all my obsessive, Type A, down to the last details, habit.
I felt kind of bad for Fleur. But as I tracked down yet one more train schedule PDF, I know it’ll all be worth it, because otherwise I will get hopefully lost. I have this tendency to always, always go the wrong/opposite direction while traveling, then freak out and go some other way that gets me more lost.
Anyways, here are somethings to consider before going on a round the island trip, or really, any multi-month trip.
Who?
I traveled solo with two kids during GYA13. One night, about two months in, I broke down and cried after the kids would not go to bed for the umpteenth time. Then I cried some more because I was sleeping with the kids and had to keep it quiet, so I felt even more 委屈.
For the next trip, I made sure to invite someone along for the trip, as I realized that for long trips, it is really important to have another adult for conversation and support, because no matter how much you feel like you can hold it together, when you have to single parent 24/7 while traveling, it will wear you down.
An added bonus for living with another family is that you can save on lodging.
You don’t have to live with them. Maybe it’s just being in Taiwan in the summer around the same time. This way, someone can bring you food when you get sick, or help watch your kids in an emergency, or provide traveling tips. I threw my back out for a few days during GYA16 and was laid up on bed for 3 days, old herniated disc issues. I’m so thankful Fleur was there to help care for the kids, take them to swim class, feed them etc.
So, in case I wasn’t clear, I will be traveling with Fleur, much like last time. We’ll be outnumbered by 5 children.
Prior to our first trip together, we took a trial 2 week camping trip, driving up the West Coast to Vancouver. After hearing some stories from a friend, I realized I needed to make sure we were compatible traveling mates. Traveling for such a long time, it’s important that the children maintain their daily routines and rules, so that there’s a semblance of normalcy.
Everyone has a different traveling and parenting style, and the two weeks allowed us to see if it would work out. The trip was a good way to see that we had similar philosophies on how we like to travel, our discipline styles, amount of TV and sugar kids can have, etc.
Why? If one parent has a no TV policy and the other doesn’t, or one parent has a stricter work schedule and the other generally plays, it may not be a routine I can maintain for 3-6 months.
During the trip, I found that kids are usually game to the same thing. So it’s not like my kids love museums while hers find it utterly boring or vice versa. All the kids find museums boring. That makes our itinerary easier to plan. Lastly, I found out that we’re both fairly introverted, meaning I would not feel bad about not wanting to talk to her as the day go on.
So yeah, go with someone who you would not mind seeing you at your darkest, or seeing you naked….whichever comes first?
Of course, Fleur is a super laid back person and everyone wants to travel with her. So maybe it’s more that I found someone that is willing to go along with my plans for 3 months. As long as she’s not complaining, I’ll take it!
When?
When’s a good time to travel to Taiwan? September is often the wettest month of the year. The weather from October to December is very nice, as the country slowly cools down to a temperature akin to our early fall temperature here. It gets down to 50s in late December and January and starts raining a lot. And pollution (PM 2.6) gets really bad in the winter due to winds blowing over from China.
However, the children complained really loudly the last time that they did not get to enjoy Halloween and Thanksgiving in the States. I knew if I wanted them to enjoy the trip I had to plan for a Spring get-away. After calling my travel agent, we picked the first cheapest flight right after Chinese New Years.
March is a also good time to travel, as the country slowly warms up and days are mostly 70’s, some 80’s, with very few rain if you’re out of Taipei or eastern Taiwan. There may be a few days of low 60s due to Mother Nature’s current menopause issues. However, you will be limited a bit in travel if you want to just pack lightly with mostly shorts and shirts, like we did. Alishan (阿里山) was in the 50s and 玉山 still had snow. Due to the March strong winds, we also had to give up our plans to go to the neighboring islands like Green Island 綠島，Orchid Island 蘭嶼, and Penghu 澎湖.
During our pre-liminary discussion, Fleur and I did a mental trip around the island. We decided that we wanted to do around 1 week per major city, that put us out to around a 6 week trip. The actual time frame was decided by the cheapest airfare we could find around a 6 week itinerary. It turned out we were gone for exactly 6 weeks.
Since we wanted to world school and we were slow travelers, we doubled the time for any itinerary we saw. For example, I couldn’t really find any suggested itinerary for Tainan past 5 days. So I more than doubled it to 12. Similarly, Taichung most people can do in 2-3 days and we stayed 6 nights. We also decided we would make these cities our home base and rent cars to take side trips out to neighboring cities.
In hindsight, having a base city saved us a lot of traveling time and I highly recommend it if you want to do low budget traveling, which means taking the slower public transit. With children as well, we were not saving time by traveling to our next destination and doing late night check-ins or too much early departures.
If you don’t plan to slow travel, then you can probably do what we did in 3 weeks. But there would be very few downtime at parks or staying home, which may be very hard for the under 6 crowd.
Where?
Unfortunately it gets hotter and hotter in Spring. 70’s is actually too hot for me. We’re trying to get the hotter cities on the west coast and south out of the way first by doing a counter-clockwise loop around the island.
There is only one problem with this approach. It is much harder to get to Alishan as most people start by going to 嘉義 Jiayi train station. So unless you really hate hot weather like me, you may want to do a clockwise loop.
So where to go in Taiwan? Originally it was a vague dream to show the children the Taiwan we didn’t get to see during our last trip. I had a hard thing reining myself in, as I kept finding more interesting places to go and things to see.
By the end of the itinerary planning process, I realized that I could and should cut out sight seeing in Northern Taiwan. It is much more work planning-wise to go down to the south for weeks. But north of Taichung and Yilan are often doable by day trips from Taipei.
Kaohsiung (southern most major city) is actually reachable in 1.5 hours by HSR. But distance-wise it’s far and mentally, if I were to go there I’d want to hang out in the area for awhile. Whereas Yilan and Taichung always seem like such great last minute getaways.
We had also considered traveling to remote islands (Lanyu, Ponhu, Green Island, Kimen, etc) but to keep our budget in line, we opted not to. The fact that March is very windy in these islands was the deciding factor, otherwise I would have tossed my budget out the window and go anyway, since as I mentioned, it is way harder to plan such a far away trip.
One great unforeseen benefit for slow traveling is that you’re not spending most of the day every 2-3 days getting to your next destination . That’s what ended up happening to us in Japan during GYA16. By the end I got really good at packing and unpacking but everything always felt rushed. There was no time to just breathe, and go to the park with the kids.
What?
As for what to do in each city, I’ve been collecting ideas for a few years. I started by researching other people’s itineraries. But at the end I realized it is better to have an idea in my head of what I wanted to do first and search that way. Most itineraries out there are not built for family travel. The itinerary that are weren’t always quite what I was looking for.
I wanted the kids:
- look at old Taiwanese architecture
- learn Taiwanese history
- visit some interesting factories, but not too many
- experience Taiwanese way of living
- hiking or go to the less traveled path
- live kind of like the locals
- do things we would normally do here, except in Chinese
So here are some items that ended up on our possibilities list. If we end up doing it, I will profile them in separate posts.
- Guided tour of a violin workshop
- Visit a toothpaste factory
- Visit a soy sauce factory
- Visit a paper factory
- Visit and participate in guided tours of Lukang and Tainan
- Bike around Sun Moon Lake
- Visit Formosan Aboriginal Culture Village for both amusement park and learn about aboriginal life
- Learn and try a hand at how the aboriginal fished
- Plant rice
- Visit the salt fields and museums
- Go to the beach, several times
- Stay overnight at an aquarium
- Eat at the night market, at every city we visit!
- Visit Costco at every city we stay at!
So the only thing we’re not quite doing is going off the beaten path. That may have to wait till the children are older.
How?
Originally I was sure we were going to take the train and bus mostly on the west coast and rent a car on the east coast. I keep hearing this is the only way to really enjoy the scenery of the East Coast.
Then we found out that car rentals are expensive in Taiwan, averaging $80-$100 a day. Yikes!
Taiwan is a very small country with a very well developed tourism industry. It only takes 1.5 hours to get from Taipei to Kaohsiung by Taiwan High Speed Rail. So here’s what we’re doing instead.
- Taiwan Rail between major cities (not high speed rail)
- Rental car second day in each major city for sight seeing and Costco visits.
- Taiwan Trip Bus 台灣好行 to get to major tourist attractions or attractions in neighboring cities
- Local train from Taiwan Rail for small tourist attractions sights.
- Taxi / Uber /Bus within each city as last resort.
Hiring taxies for the whole day is a very good option for many people. It’s called 包車.
With 7 people in our party, it didn’t make sense to 包車. They typically charge $3000-$4000 for 8 hours but for a 7 or 9 seater it’s $5000-$6000, more expensive than car rental. It’s worth it to 包車 if you can find a good taxi driver who can give you a little history and tour as well.
Similarly, sometimes it is cheaper to take a taxi when you have 4 people, then taking the bus.
Expect children under 6 or under 115cm to be free and children between 6-12 to be half price for most everything.
Budget
Is there actually money for this trip? Other than airfare, how much does one need to travel?
One reason we decided to go for six weeks and world school is because the average daily cost goes down the longer you stay at a place. Other than airfare, the second biggest expense is lodging and you can typically negotiate cheaper rates the longer you stay at a place.
There is a huge range of daily averages when you read World Schooler blogs. I decided to set an arbitrary $100 a day per family budget to start and see if we could stick to that. This is a figure I typically see in Southeast Asia travels so I know our cost may be higher. However, starting with a budget allowed me to really search for AirBnB deals, because I realized I needed my lodging to be close to $40-$50 a day vs the $70-$100 ones I tend to go for.
Another friend who did a 2 week around the island trip 3 years ago had a budget closer to $150-$200 a day. From my searches, it feels like the range is $30 for hostel, $40-$60 for budget, and $100-$125 for nice and normal (4 star and up).
Voila, with all this thinking about how we’re going to travel out of the way, the next time is to buy all airfare, reserve lodging and car rental, and plan an itinerary!
