testmeat photoblog

early on when i arrived in india i remember chatting to an italian traveller who had been to quite a few countries in asia. i said that i wasn't sure where i would visit after india, however vietnam was high on my list. he said that he had thought similar, but when he got to vietnam the reality didn't quite match his expectations. as a counter to that, he revealed that a country which far exceeded his expectations was taiwan. this planted a seed in my head, i knew very little about taiwan beyond a surface level understanding of it's history with china and that the capital taipei was (in my head) a futuristic asian city like singapore. this ignorance, along with meeting very few other travellers who had visited the country, made it all the more attractive as a destination. the clincher was when i checked the entry rules and discovered that i could stay without a visa for up to three months. i ended up staying for pretty much that entire duration, with the first couple of months mainly in taipei before i ventured south to other parts of the island. so to kick things off here's a shot of the iconic taipei 101 tower, which was the tallest building on earth when it was first completed, and does nothing to dispel my assumption of taipei being a futuristic city.

here's another shot of the tower, with a few other buildings for context and scale. this was taken at the top of elephant mountain which is a fairly short but incredibly steep walk from the city streets below, and despite doing it at night the humidity was still so high that i was a sweaty mess by the time i arrived at this viewpoint