Taroko Gorge

Taroko is a crack in a mountain of marble: for nineteen kilometres the Liwu river, milky jade after rain and clear green without it, has cut down through rock that the island's collision with the continent pushed up out of the sea, and the walls it left are so close and so high that at the Tunnel of Nine Turns you can touch marble with both hands and see sky as a ribbon. A road built by hand in the 1950s — two hundred and twelve men died making it — hangs on ledges and threads tunnels up the gorge to Tianxiang, the village at the top; a shrine with a waterfall through it remembers the dead at the mouth; swallows nest in the grotto halfway; and where the mountains meet the Pacific, the Qingshui cliffs fall a thousand metres straight into the sea.

The traveller comes from Hualien on the coast, twenty kilometres south, and goes up the gorge slowly, stopping at the Eternal Spring Shrine first, then the Swallow Grotto with a helmet on, then the Nine Turns for the walls at arm's length; sleeps at Tianxiang if there is a bed, and walks the Baiyang trail in the morning to the cave where the water comes through the roof; comes back down for the Shakadang trail along a side stream the colour of a jewel; and, on the way to or from Hualien, stops at the Qingshui cliffs and looks straight down.

The Guide's honesty: Taroko is a living mountain and it moves — earthquakes and typhoons close trails, drop rocks and, some years, the whole park; check what is open the day you go, wear the helmet where they hand it out, and do not argue with a closed gate; the road is narrow and the coaches are many between ten and three — go early, or on a weekday, or by scooter from Hualien if you ride well; the gorge is one of the finest things on the island and the island knows it: the queues at the shrine and the tunnel are the price; and the Truku people whose land this is have their own name for everything here — the terrace at Buluowan is a good place to learn a few.