I wanted to start a more positive post. Anyone care to share the best places to ride your bike (bicycle) and to take walks/hikes in and around the city of Taipei?
Bonus points: The lower the possibility of me getting hit by a scooter/car the better. I am not a daredevil biker just will be looking for relaxation and greenery in parks with bike trails or hiking trails. I searched the posts but a lot of the info is from quite a while ago.
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Hiking and biking trails don’t tend to change much over time.
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Very helpful thanks
Kind of simple.
Riverside biking. Can rent bikes at various places. Covers Taipei City, New Taipei City, and up to Tamsui.
Hiking: Elephant mountain near Tpe 101, Makong tea area via gondola near zoo. Some stuff up by Tienmu, and then a ton of hiking all over Yangmingshan.
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I beg to differ. Despite there being many 古道 or ancient trails, the speed at which the local flora reclaims space is quite something. Especially the razor sharp silver grass that everyone finds so beautiful when it flowers. There are also the people fencing off land, putting up barbed wire and telling hikers they aren’t welcome. Some people go around cutting ropes to make “dangerous” trails “safer”. Some trails are temporarily closed for repair. And thankfully, some groups clear and open up old overgrown trails.
OP, a good place to start would be the Taipei Grand Trail, a network of ridge hikes around the city. If you’re into collectables you can get a towel and maybe other stuff if you take photos of yourself at all 12 (?) trail markers within a year.
Aside from that I recommend the books by former longterm resident Richard Saunders. He started a hiking group many years ago which is still organising hikes today and mainly operates through facebook and meetup: Taipei Hikers. The are other local and also Chinese language groups on both of those platforms.
As for biking, there is a path which does a loop round the whole of Taipei, basically linking the riverside bike paths. However, it’s not marked as clearly as the round island route.
And if you’re the adventurous type, you could just check a map that uses the street map software like maps.me, pick a trail and see where it goes. Things are so much easier now there are backup tools like accurate offline maps that can use GPS in case one gets more lost than one wanted to.
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What part of Taipei are you in? There’re biking and hiking trails all around Taipei. If you’re looking for relaxation, then I would find something close to where you live so you wouldn’t have to travel across the city to get to a “relaxing” trail.
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Thank you! I agree that trails can change a lot with overgrowth, reclaimed space, human related changes, all other sorts of things. I really appreciate your specific info on the books and the app. I am going to check if mapy.cz works for Taiwan as well. It has a lot of smaller unmarked biking and hiking trails and I was able to use it all over Europe, Canada, US in case anyone else would like to check it out for future travel.
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That loop is 70 kilometers, hardly the relaxation the OP is looking for. The section that’s not marked clearly is the eastern side of the loop that goes into the hills behind Elephant mountain. One would have to climb about 200 meters on regular roads, not a bike path.
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You’re probably right. One of the ways I relax is by pushing myself to my limits, but I should remember that’s not everyone’s cup of tea. I’ve done the loop on a youbike and I’ve done that climb in both directions on a youbike, and I’ve seen others do so, so I assumed it wasn’t so hard.
There are a number of parks with trails, some which can go up into the hills or mountains. So it’s sometimes possible to go for a walk in the park and “if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
Yangmingshan, mentioned above, is such a place where if you take a bus there are easy paths or less easy. Some of the parks in Neihu, Dazhi, and Fuzhoushan park also.
The riverside is where you are going to get the best bang for your buck in terms of uninterrupted bike riding without having to worry about scooters and cars.
I’ve explored most of the riverside paths and I still find the best portion of the bike path is the north side of the path from Rainbow bridge (close to Rao He Night Market and Song Shan station), heading west towards Da Zhi Bridge. You got 101 in the background and Yang Ming Shan in front of you. Not to mention the path is very quiet along Neihu Software park area as there’s not much residential buildings in that area, which means less people.
We have this thread for Riverside bike path news
For walks in open spaces and not having to head all the way over to the riverside. I would try Yuan Shan MRT station area. Plenty of open space (actually not too far from the riverside too). The place does get busy on a nice warm sunny day and summer evenings, so keep that in mind.
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