Advice on scooting the east coast (so much conflicting info!)

Travel Taiwan Travel
1

Hello all,
The GF and I are planning on taking off from Kaohsiung and heading round the souther tip and up towards Taroko gorge–10 days. We plan to stop and explore at our leisure and visit some recommended sites, but we have logistical questions that, despite pouring over countless threads, we can’t seem to figure out.

Is there any cross–island highway south or north that is accessible? We have read the northern one (Highway 8, I believe) is open while the souther one (highway 20 or 27?) is closed or that both are closed, or that neither are open. Taroko’s website is even saying that you can take highway 8 to highway 14 (East to West) heading into Taichung. Has anyone done this route? We’d really like to find a reasonable way to avoid backtracking when heading back to Kaohsiung to save time whilst seeing new scenery. Any and all help is greatly appreciated and my plan is to offer up a trip report when we come back to better help others looking to take a similar trip.

Please spare me the negative comments about being lazy and not searching. I’ve spent a couple hours on this site and others looking for answers and could use helpful input.

Thanks again.

2

Hwy 20 closed.

Hwy 8 and 14, Taichung to Taroko, open unless parts are temporarily closed.

North Cross (hwy 7) open.

From Kaohsiung take Hwy 9 or County Rd 199 across.

3

When I went over the 8 and 14 about 2 weeks ago they were blasting unstable rock off just about 1 km after the eternal spring shrine. The road was closed and just opened up every even hour (10, 12, 14, 16,…) for some time… not sure how long that still will go on, had to wait for about 1h to get through…

The rest of the road was in pretty good condition but that was just 2 days before the last typhoon.