The alarm went off at 5:15AM in my Hualien guesthouse. Outside, the sky was that pre-dawn gray that could go either way — clear or overcast. I'd been watching the weather app obsessively for two days, waiting for the one morning that Taroko Gorge would give me.
This was it.
The Drive In
I'd rented a scooter the day before — 500 TWD from a shop near Hualien Station — and the ride to the gorge entrance took 20 minutes on empty roads. The air went from sea-level warm to mountain cool in the span of a single tunnel. By the time I passed the East Entrance gate, I could see the Liwu River below, its water the color of jade.
Taroko Gorge isn't one of those places that builds gradually. It hits you immediately. The marble walls rise from the riverbed like the sides of a cathedral, except this cathedral was built by water over five million years and the ceiling is open sky.
Shakadang Trail: 6:30AM
I parked at the bridge 200 meters past the entrance gate and descended to the Shakadang Trail. At 6:30AM, I was the only person on it.
The trail is carved into the cliff face — literally chiseled from marble by workers who must have had either incredible skill or incredible disregard for personal safety. Below, the Shakadang River ran clear over marble boulders worn smooth by millennia of water. The color of the water — somewhere between turquoise and green, depending on the depth — is not something a phone camera captures accurately. You just have to see it.
I walked for an hour. The trail runs 4.1km one way, hugging the cliff about 20 meters above the river. Marble formations jutted from the walls in patterns that looked designed — smooth curves, sharp angles, veins of white running through gray. At one point, I found a Truku aboriginal carving in the rock face, so weathered it was almost invisible.
The silence was total. Not peaceful silence — the kind of silence that reminds you how loud your normal life is.
Eternal Spring Shrine: 8AM
By the time I reached the Eternal Spring Shrine, the first tour buses were arriving. The shrine is Taroko's postcard — a red-and-white structure perched on a cliff face with a waterfall cascading from the mountain into a pool below.
What the postcards don't show is the memorial plaque. The shrine was built in 1958 to honor the 212 workers who died constructing the Central Cross-Island Highway — a road blasted through solid marble using dynamite and hand tools. Many were veterans of the Chinese Civil War who came to Taiwan with the Nationalist government.
I stood at the railing and tried to imagine building a road through this. The marble walls are hundreds of meters high. The river below is relentless. The technology in 1958 was basically explosives and courage. 212 people died making a road so that people like me could drive through on a rented scooter and take photos.
The shrine felt different after that.
Swallow Grotto: 9:30AM
Swallow Grotto is the section of gorge road that appears in every Taiwan documentary. The road is carved through a narrow section where the marble walls close in to maybe 30 meters apart, with the river 200 meters below.
A 500m walkway on the opposite cliff gives you the view. Hard hats are mandatory — marble chunks do fall from the walls, and the dents in the helmets at the distribution point made that viscerally clear.
I walked the grotto slowly. Spring swallows nested in the cliff holes above — small, fast birds darting in and out of marble pockets worn by their ancestors over uncountable generations. The sound echoed off the walls: river below, wind between the cliffs, birds overhead.
A young Taiwanese couple next to me stood at the railing staring down at the river for a full five minutes without speaking. I understood. Sometimes the scale of a place compresses language into silence.
Tunnel of Nine Turns: 11AM
The Tunnel of Nine Turns reopened in 2024 after years of safety improvements, and it might be the most architecturally elegant trail in the park. A 700m walkway through hand-carved tunnels, each opening framing a different view of the narrow gorge below.
The first tunnel opens to a view of the river cutting through marble the color of storm clouds. The third tunnel frames a bend where the water has carved an amphitheater from the rock. The seventh — my favorite — has a window that looks straight down 200 meters to where the water hits a boulder and turns white.
By noon, the trail was busy with tour groups. I'd timed it perfectly — arriving just as the first groups were finishing. 30 minutes of mostly solitary walking.
Baiyang Trail: 1PM
I almost skipped this one. Fatigue was setting in, my legs were complaining, and the 2.1km trail through seven tunnels sounded like more effort than I had left.
I went anyway. I'm still grateful I did.
The trail itself is beautiful — each tunnel emerges into a different landscape, from forested gorge to exposed cliff face. But the destination is the thing: the Water Curtain Cave.
Inside the final tunnel, groundwater seeps through the ceiling, creating a curtain of water that falls from every direction. I stood in it — rain jacket on, flashlight in hand — while water streamed over my hood and puddled around my hiking boots. The sound was like standing inside a waterfall, which is exactly what I was doing.
A Taiwanese hiker next to me was laughing. Not at anything in particular. Just the absurdity of standing inside a mountain while it rained on you from the ceiling. I started laughing too. Some experiences are too weird for any other response.
Qingshui Cliffs: 4PM
On the drive back to Hualien, I stopped at the Qingshui Cliffs viewpoint — where the mountains drop 800 meters straight into the Pacific Ocean. The afternoon light was hitting the cliff faces at an angle that turned the rock golden and the sea a deep, impossible blue.
I sat on a guardrail and ate a convenience store rice triangle (28 TWD from the 7-Eleven in Xincheng) and watched the ocean.
What Taroko Teaches
I've been to the Grand Canyon. And while Taiwan's Sun Moon Lake is peaceful contemplation, Taroko is geology made personal. I've seen the Norwegian fjords. Taroko is different from both, and I think the difference is intimacy. The Grand Canyon is viewed from a distance — you stand at the rim and look across. The fjords are experienced from a boat in the middle.
Taroko puts you inside the geology. The trails are carved into the marble. The tunnels pass through the mountain. You walk beside the river that made all of this. The scale is enormous, but the experience is close, tactile, human-sized.
Five million years of water, cutting marble. And somehow, standing inside the result, you feel not small but included — as if the gorge has room for you too.
The scooter ride back to Hualien took 20 minutes. I went to the night market and ate pepper buns and mango shaved ice and sat in a plastic chair on a loud, bright street filled with people. The contrast with the morning — the silence, the marble, the water — made both experiences sharper.
That's Taiwan. You can go from five million years of geology to a pepper bun in under an hour. And somehow, both are exactly what you need.
