The Quest


I can understand why so many people don’t have cars in Taiwan. Everything is just so easily accessible with the use of public transport. But lately we’ve been considering buying a car. We decided that we should really make use of the opportunity of living in another country and not to just get stuck back into the routine of daily life. And with Taiwan being small enough that you’d basically be able to go anywhere within a day, we really want to experience everything it has to offer. So the quest to find a cheap, reliable car started.

The most important requirements of the car had to be reliability and enough space to load our bikes and surfboards so that we could take them with us on any trip. After a lot of driving around and checking the websites for something that would meet our needs, we finally saw something we thought would be perfect. A Toyota Zace, and according to everyone in Taiwan, it was the car to go for. The only thing was that it was all the way on the other side of the island.

After talking to the owner and the fact that we have a 2week vacation, we decided that we’ll make the trip North, to Yilan just outside Taipei to go and buy the car.
We thought, seeing that we’ll be in Taipei, we might as well do the touristy thing and visit a few of the hot spots. We booked our THSR (Taiwan High Speed Rail) tickets online and picked it up at the local Family Mart. I have no idea how they do it but you can basically do anything from a 7-eleven & Family Mart.
So we got up at 5 on Saturday morning and headed to the train station. Our train left at 6:30. Two hours later we were in Taipei.

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