Hualien (花蓮) Weekend with Taroko Gorge and Dolphin Safari

Hualien 花蓮 is a small city with about 300000 inhabitants on the east coast of Taiwan. It is actually the second largest city on the east side. It faces the Pacific Ocean on the east side and the Central mountain range on the west side.

I have heard about Taroko Gorge 太魯閣 for many years and my taxi driver, whom I usually book when I land in Taipei, asked me to go there since before. I could book him anytime. However, I didn't want to wake up so early and have a full day with him. Also, the price of 4000-5000NTD is quite expensive and you probably don't have time to see other things around the city of Hualien either.
Therefore, we wanted to go there by ourselves and spend a weekend in Hualien just to see what it could offer. It is also good to see something else than Taipei all the time.

My colleague helped me book train tickets online to Hualien. You can only book the tickets two weeks in advance. A return ticket costs about 900NTD/pers.

Train to Hualien.

We booked a hostelry called Lienfook, which was quite cheap. The standard was really bad, but since we just slept there, we could live with it.
We wanted to see more of the city so booking three nights there during a longer weekend was preferred. Moreover, even though there are some hotels or resorts up in the Taroko mountains, it is very isolated and you will have basically nothing to do. If you stroll around in the city, like we like to do, you'd better stay in Hualien.

Taroko National Park was re-established 1986 and is one of the nine national parks in Taiwan. This park is named after the Taroko Gorge, which is the landmark of the park. Did you know Taroko means "magnificent and beautiful" in the so called Truku language? This area is well known for its marble. It was actually the river called Liwu that carved the gorge itself into marble.
The rock you see began over 200 million years ago as sediment on the bottom of the ocean. Did you also know that the region is still being uplifted by approximately 0.5cm every year?

We went there in the mid of September and the weather started becoming milder. The train trip took about 2h in a very comfortable train compartment with spacious seats. You can even put your
luggage before you. The train left and arrived on time. This ride will take you along the northern east coast, then further down south and you will see quite many nice places if you look out of the window. You can even see the famous Turtle Island if the weather is nice.

When we arrived in Hualien, we immediately looked for a taxi to take us to our hostelry Lienfook somewhere more down town. What surprised me were the number of female taxi drivers. That's good, actually. We asked hotel receptionist for a day trip to Taroko Gorge and agreed to pay 1000NTD/pers. We didn't know if they will pick us up with a van or a tour bus. It depends on the number of tour travellers, they said.

We had a quite chill first day there. We went to Nanbin Park near the water and chilled there for a while. In the evening we walked on the shopping street down town.

Nanbin Park.

Nanbin Park.

The main shopping street of Hualien.

The next morning around 9:00, a tour guide lady came to pick us up from the lobby and luckily it was a big tour bus. After driving around to pick up another 20 people or so, we were finally on our way to Taroko National Park. This lady was telling a lot of stories and other things, but my mandarin is limited so we didn't understand much. It took nearly 45min to reach to the gate of Taroko National Park, which is located north of Hualien. We stopped there for some pics and drove further up to some kind of headquarter or visitor center. We found a trail and we walked just a little bit before turning back since we had a schedule to follow.

The bus took us to to several other places like Swallow Grotto 燕子口, Tunnels of Nine Turns 九曲洞 and Liufang Bridge 流芳橋. At lunch time, we arrived to a hostel, near Tianxiang 天祥, with a quite big canteen where we had a so-so lunch. Afterwards, they took us to a place called Qingshui Cliff 清水斷崖 where you can see clear distinct blue water if the weather is nice. On that day, it was a quite grey, but the water was still blue enough to make it beautiful. The last location we went to was the beach called Qixingtan Beach 七星潭. We were home around 17.00.

 The gate of Taroko National Park.

Liufang Bridge.

Liufang Bridge.

Tianxiang.

Qingshui Cliff.

Qixingtan Beach.

All in all, this tour was neither excellent nor bad. At least, for people like us who have never been there, it was great to "investigate" this place before eventually going there again.

When we arrived to our hostelry after the tour, we booked a Whale & Dolphin Safari for 800NTD/pers on the coming day. Our expectation was of course to see some Killer whales, but they told us the biggest chance is to see dolphins "only". We have been on Dolphin Safari in Bali before and it was quite OK even though it was on a small boat.

The next morning, the organizer came to pick us up in a van and drove us to the harbor 20-30min from our hotel. We embarked a bigger boat here in Hualien (compared to Bali) with around 40-50 people per boat. There were 5-6 boats on the sea that morning. Not far after we left the harbor, we saw quite many dolphins. As my wife says: "Dolphins want to show off. They are show off animals." Yeah, I guess we saw around 10 wild dolphins swimming and jumping near our boats. We stopped there only for a few minutes and took off further out in the Pacific Ocean. However, we never saw any other dolphins or whales despite driving around for 1.5h out there. It was quite disappointing, but at least we saw some dolphins.

Going out on Whale & Dolphin Safari!

When we came back to town, we had nothing to do after our lunch so we decided to rent a motorbike for 500NTD/day. My wife negotiated down the price with 100NTD. I needed to hand in my ARC in return. I guess it is difficult for foreigners to rent a bike elsewhere, so you can go to this place called Pony Rental in the corner next to Chin Yeh hotel near the train station.

We drove to Taroko around 15:00 and arrived 45min later. It was not as dangerous as I thought since there is a dedicated lane for motorbikes and bicycles.
We came to the Taroko National Park entrance and took another road to see the Eternal Spring Shrine 長春祠. There were a lot of tourists buses already. We missed this place the day before since the tour bus just passed by without mentioning it too much. It was disappointing since this was one of the places I've seen on pictures before and we wanted to stop by and have a look. This place is really beautiful.
So, since we had a motorbike, this was perfect to make up for it. We also hiked the 2.2km long Changchun Trail 長春祠步道 up to the temple and bell tower. From up there, the canyon view was great and it was worth the sweat. It started becoming dark and on our way out of the park, we stopped by at a small creek for a short while.

The gate of Taroko National Park again.

Eternal Spring Shrine.

The bell tower.

Panorama view from the bell tower.

We ended our last night in Hualien with bowling and games (baseball, mini-bowling, basketball, darts, pool, table tennis, etc) at Giraffe Park, which is quite near the train station.

Giraffe Park.

Overall, this weekend trip was nice and it was perfect with just 3 nights there. The city of Hualien is not so impressive and is rather small. More people move out of the city than in to the it and that is understandable. The shore is not so nice and the coastline is very steep, so it is not suitable for swimming. The waves are also too strong.

Hualien Train Station.

What really made this trip memorable was when we rented the motorbike to drive to Taroko and around the city. I filled the tank completely before going, but I still had maybe 80% left even though we drove Taroko back and forth and drove around the city.

This place is also one of the must-go places in Taiwan. Plan a couple of days here if you have a longer stay in Taiwan.