Have you been to 新寮瀑布 / Shinliao waterfall? You can ride the bike until the entrance of the hiking area, then it’s a 10/15 minutes walk. Not a huge climb but can add variety.
From Meihua lake the best way to improve is to go West and start tackling the first few hills around Sanxing. Plenty of restaurants and food/drink stands in Sanxing, not as many once you cross the bridge on the Yilan river. Basically there’s a petrol station then just death and silence.
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I have but not on the bike. That area (including the botanical gardens) is one of the places we take the kids to go hiking.
I do bike around that area sometimes. I have a loop I like to do which is past the sports park, down to the ocean and around to Dongshan Water Park and then up to Meihua Lake before heading home. It’s a nice ride (around 40km) and most of the ride is on a bike path (although I still have to deal with people driving scooters and occasionally cars on the bike path).
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Ah, you’re in Yilan. There’s a nice hill behind you called Hehuanshan. Put that on your bucket list. riding through the cabbage fields about half way up is a doozy.
Or try Mingce Forest, by taking a right off the Hehaunshan road… up the north cross island highway. Also access to Taoyuan that way, should you feel so inclined. (haha, that’s a bonus climbing joke there!)
Also, as mentioned above, Taipingshan. Nice road up!
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I have a can of Draught Guinness Beer before I go (sometimes another on way back), take homemade oat honey, nuts, raisins flapjack.
Bottle of water sometime bottle of Fin, cornflakes and milk when I get home. May be changed to chocolate milk now though.
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I can respect that. My Strava picture is of me with a bottle of Gold Label outside of a 7-11 following a ride. Never before a ride, though. I don’t think that would work for me.
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Forgot all about these guys. But all the talk about homemade bars reminded me. I think I’ll get a box of bars and see how they are for cycling. (I am in no way affiliated with them. Very nice group of expats, though, and their runs are great fun.)
Scroll down for bars that should work well for cycling.
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I’m still eating the Nutrigrain bars from Costco and they are the bees knees.
Not so great when eating on the bike, but great for when you stop to rest as they tend to be very dry and need water to go down smoothly.
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Make your own, genuinely no additives!
I need to put a post on mine in home cooking section.
Bit dry, Go well with Guinness 
amphetamines do wonders for endurance.
New pre-ride recipe: 1 boiled egg mashed with two spoons of cold rice and a healthy splooge of Frank’s Red Hot. Haven’t needed a mid-ride(approx km 25 or 30) refuel yet on the 3 rides I’ve started it with.
IKEA is a good shop to get food for long rides in Taiwan or so I’ve heard from people frequently doing 200-300km.
You want to eat as much as your stomach can digest. It really sucks in Taiwan however Vs Europe to get food… Muesli bars overpriced to the moon. Gels even more. Best get gels from myprotein online imported from Europe if you don’t wanna get broke.
It’s best to fuel only in liquids but hard to do without a support team…
My nutrition on a long ride. Morning some dumplings, plus I buy some sweet pastry. Yesterday 4 of those sweet bean bars (each maybe 70-80g) and a baozi for take away.
Plus I took 200g of those always discounted mango cake from pxmart. They are high carb low sugar. That was supposed to get me through the first 155km and 3500m uphill. Well easy to say not enough. I broke down after 6-7 hours in. Then I wanted to have some beef noodle soup but my favourite restaurant was closed. Also my other 2 to go choices. So it was some non tasty dandan mian and 7dumplings at a chain restaurant.
5km before reaching home and another 500m altitude 40km stopped at a Michelin rated restaurant and got their set menu which is pretty huge. Then stopped at datie for some coconut dessert (basically iced dohua with tofu replaced by coconut, really yummy). Then at home still 40g of Collagen protein. Drank 6.5l of water on the trip and scale told me I lost 2.5kg so severely dehydrated… Should have drunk more.
Woke up at night super hungry… After such long rides going to exhaustion / overreaching I sleep like shit. Next day best take a nap of 2-3 hours after breakfast.
Can you refill water bottles at 7-11? I always look for water refill stations on the road to refill my 800m bottles (two) and usually then also drunk 600-700ml.
A good source of quick carbs in Taiwan are the cold noodles with sesame at 7-11/family mart.
In Europe it’s much easier. Eat baguette or bread with cheese, some muesli bars and some chocolate. Was easier to fuel on long days.
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Which 7-11s are you going to that don’t have bread, cheese and chocolate? 
Well overpriced chocolate is the only thing they may have (it makes no sense to me why chocolate is so expensive. Cacao is always imported in Europe too) Never seen something I would call bread or cheese…
Coming to this late, but it’s something I’m interested in for my own rides, which typically last four and a half hours and cover a distance of maybe 30 miles/50km and an average total climb of 700 metres. Being doing this twice a week since July, on and off, when I found I had more time to go cycling, and I’ve been slowly building up my ability to push up more and steeper hills.
In the past (ten years ago), I’d get tired and slow and head home, blaming a lack of fitness for my inability to go further and not my having failed to eat anything during the ride. Thanks to Youtube, I know better now.
I head out at 4am. I eat a banana and drink a home-made coffee outside the building where I live before I start or, if I’m not hungry, I wait until an hour into my ride.
Somewhere about the time I hit the first steep slopes, I eat a Snickers. I usually get hungry again during the last hour and eat a Granola House oat bar from Costco.
I put half an electrolyte tablet from a local chemist/drugstore into each of two 600ml bottles. They’re not sweetened - stuff like Pocari Sweat tastes much too artificial to me.
Originally, I’d take two oat bars with me and no Snickers. Then I read about other cyclists using Snickers and found eating one was like getting a video game power-up once I hit the hills. Far from certain how healthy it is, but whenever I’ve tried going for a four hour-plus ride without one, I’ve really, really missed it.
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