16: tea fields and ancient trees alishan

This March, I spent a month in Taiwan traveling around the island and generally falling in love with every single place I visited. One of those that stands out the most is Alishan, which is a mountainous region with a handful of small towns in central Taiwan that's part of Chiayi County. It’s an area renowned for its scenery, ancient cypress trees, historic forest railway, and some of the best oolong teas in the world.

When I started researching for my trip to Taiwan, I knew I wanted to stay in the Alishan area for a while. I also decided I was going to make it my mission to photograph the tea fields around Shizhuo. It’s been a dream of mine to someday photograph the production processes on a coffee farm since somewhere around 2011 (hello coffee roasters/importers/shops, please hire me!) but until visiting Taiwan, I hadn’t thought much about tea.

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Alishan High Mountain Tea (+ Coffee!)

The best tea, like coffee, needs a few key things: high altitude, acidic and well-drained soil, a tropical/subtropical climate, sunshine, and plenty of rainfall. In Alishan, most of the tea is grown between 1000 and 2300masl, with the highest altitude teas being the best quality and more expensive. Alishan is known mostly for its production of green oolong teas, which are great for cardiovascular health, can help lower cholesterol, boost immune system function, and accelerate metabolism. The flavor of tea varies just like coffee, depending on different factors involved during the growing, harvesting, and processing stages. I am by no means a tea expert, but for the most part, the flavors I was getting out of the teas I drank were mellow, delicately fruity, and savory with very little or no astringency.

The tea fields themselves are mesmerizing to look at. When you’re standing at the bottom of a section of fields, it’s difficult to understand how much elevation change there is between there and the top. When you start to hike them, you quickly realize they are literally carved out of the side of mountains. Farmers use a network of ladders or trails to move between different sections and they have extremely self-explanatory names like Tea Trail, Sakura Trail, Cloud Trail, or Sunset Trail. Most of the trails connect to one another, and after looking at a good map, I realized you could hike some serious distance in this area if you wanted to.

By some chance I happened to be in the area for the exact weekend that local roaster and coffee estate Zou Coffee was hosting a pour over competition. I learned that Alishan also has a small but incredible coffee production scene, which makes sense given that conditions for growing here ideal. Visiting Zou is a must if you’re in Alishan since you can try coffees grown right outside their door and walk around the estate. From what I gathered and after conversations with a shop owner, Taiwan is still new to producing coffee but its gaining recognition worldwide. Given its small size and much more dense population compared to other coffee growing regions of the world, it can’t compete from a volume perspective which I think makes it even more interesting. I’ve never had Taiwanese specialty coffee anywhere outside of Taiwan which made it feel like a genuinely unique experience, something that’s harder and harder to come by these days in our globalized world.

Visiting Alishan

I booked a stay on a tea farm in Shizhuo for a few nights, found a hotel in Fenqihu for the second half of my time in Alishan, rented a car from nearby Chiayi HSR station, and set out for five days. It was a sunny turning point after three straight weeks of rain every day. I had some uncharacteristically clear, sunny days in Alishan, which is uncommon because the entire area often gets shrouded in clouds. Alishan is known for the “sea of clouds” phenomenon that occurs as a result of some things I remember learning in an oceanography course in college, but have since grown fuzzy on. What I can tell you from experience is this: it’s one of the most beautiful things to watch the clouds form and flow across the landscape, especially when the sun is low enough to illuminate the mountains. I managed to see the sea of clouds on my last night while watching a sunset I’ll never forget.

I split my time between Shizhuo and Fenqihu, which is a more famous small town due to its position on the Alishan Forest Railway. The days were filled with hiking short and long trails through the tea fields, bamboo forests, and the cypress groves that cover the mountains. Some things I’ll never forget: waking up to the sunrise in my room that had enormous picture frame windows overlooking the tea fields in Shizhuo, driving on two-way roads that seemed barely wide enough for one compact car, hiking the Eryanping Trail at sunset, eating a sweet potato from 7-11 on the side of the road at 7am, coffee from Zou Coffee, an incredible lunch at Saiji Tea House, wasabi ice cream at the Fenqihu railway station, the best bento box from Fenchihu Hotel, and how quiet the town of Fenqihu was in the evening hours after all of the tour buses had left.

Alishan National Park

I also spent a day inside Alishan National Park, where I woke up at 4am to take the famous sunrise train and hiked beneath trees old enough to have been around since before the fall of Rome (thinking about that is crazy to me). I found that after a day hiking around the national park, I didn’t need to spend any more time there. It’s crowded because of how accessible the park is, and while the infrastructure is almost as beautiful as the natural sights within the park, it has a bit of a Disneyland-esque feel. I’m not knocking it at all, it’s 100% worth visiting, I just fell in love with the towns outside of the park and felt happy I decided to concentrate my time there.

Because accommodation options are limited in Alishan and there’s a high demand, the nightly rates at hotels can look exorbitant for what you get. I didn’t find it worth the $600/night, but if you had the money, Hotel Indigo Alishan looks like one of the most beautiful properties. It boasts the title of being the highest international hotel in Taiwan and the views are unbeatable. If you stay at one of the hotels inside the National Park, you’re afforded the convenience of being able to see and hike all that’s in that area without needing a car. From the park, there are buses and the train that can be utilized to get to towns like Shizhuo and Fenqihu but they are on limited schedules and are admittedly not the easiest to interpret. From my experience, it felt like it would have been difficult to really enjoy all that the area had to offer without a car. Driving in Taiwan is easy and even in Alishan, the main roads are extremely well maintained. Renting a car requires an International Drivers Permit, which you can get at AAA. During my month in Taiwan, it was the only place I visited where I felt like a car was necessary.

The ritual of drinking tea is something of a grounding practice that I took home with me (along with 1kg of some of the best high mountain oolong I’ve ever had). Like making coffee, it requires a fixed amount of time and attention to make correctly, which usually helps keep me focused and stops my brain from wandering to places it doesn’t need to be.

I’ve been in a bit of a funk since getting back from travels this winter. I don’t know if it’s the struggle of readjusting to life, the general state of awfulness in the world, or some other secret third thing I’ve yet to figure out. I haven’t been able to write much about recent travels for this reason because it’s felt like the noise in my head is overpowering everything. I’ve barely had the time or attention span to sort through 8,000+ images from Vietnam and Taiwan. Looking at these photographs with a cup of the remaining tea I have left from Alishan has been a much-needed escape to a quieter, far more peaceful place.