Digital Nomad in Taiwan: What Makes Taiwan Special?

Hard Techno parties held inside a working temple, in Taipei. (Photos: 大豪 @wangdahow, temple_meltdown)

As a digital nomad, or just someone who moves from one place to the next, you are usually choosing somewhere to base yourself for a few months rather than for good, which makes you half tourist and half resident, and the question that actually decides it is whether basing yourself here for a while adds up to something you could not get by hopping through the usual spots. Taiwan’s answer is a mix that is hard to find in one place: the convenience and safety of a rich country, an outdoors that barely any tourists have picked over, and a culture that goes a lot deeper than the skyline suggests. You could find any one of them somewhere else. Having all three in the same place, with the time a longer stay gives you to actually use them, is the part that is rare.

It runs like a rich country, and no one’s working an angle

The infrastructure is what surprises people first, because it is better than the prices would lead you to expect. Home internet and unlimited mobile data are both startlingly fast and cost you only a few lunches a month, the trains keep to the minute, and when something breaks it usually gets fixed. The part that takes longer to notice is the honesty underneath it. Because the island makes its money from factories rather than visitors, there is no tourist economy set up to squeeze you, so the fruit stall gives you the same price it just gave the grandmother in front of you. Out in the countryside you find stalls of guava and eggs left with nobody watching them and a box for your coins, and in the cities small kids take the metro across town on their own without anyone thinking twice. After a while you stop noticing that nobody is trying to get one over on you, until you go somewhere else and feel it missing.

The nature is still a secret, because almost no one comes

This is the part the visitor numbers give away. Taiwan gets a small fraction of the foreign tourists that Thailand or Bali do, and it changes how the outdoors feels. A trail an hour out of the city can be empty on a weekday. The reefs off the smaller islands get so few foreign divers that you often have the coral to yourself, and the hot springs up in the hills usually have no queue. The terrain is packed and varied, a tropical coast on one side and mountains over three thousand metres down the middle, and it still does not have the worn, over-photographed feeling of the places everyone goes. Most of the time you are not competing for the good spots, you are wondering why you seem to be the only one who found this one.

The trail up to Jiaming Lake, high in the mountains. On an ordinary day you can walk it for hours and barely pass another person.

There is more history here than the skyline admits

The culture rewards the same kind of wandering. On one old street, inside a couple of hundred metres, you can pass a Qing dynasty temple still full of incense, a wooden shophouse left from the Japanese decades, and a shopfront with the curls of a European style that came in through the ports. Below the Han Chinese mainstream there are Hakka towns with their own language and food, and below all of it the indigenous peoples whose ancestors sailed out from this island to settle half the Pacific. It is a lot of separate history folded into a small place, and most of it is not kept behind glass. We go through it properly in our community, so here it is enough to say there is far more of it than you will get through in a few months.

A Japanese-era building in Taipei, one architectural layer of many you can pass on a single street. (Photo: 丘崈, CC0)

The Amis harvest festival, Ilisin. The island’s first cultures are still lived rather than displayed. (Photo: Kevshen, CC BY-SA 4.0)

And a layer you only reach by being shown

Some of the best of it is not online at all. Alongside the polished side there is a whole underground, the kind of thing that reaches you through a person rather than a search, which is the real reason a few months beats a few days. One example is the crew that throws electronic parties inside working temples, the Koxinga temple among them, where the organiser lays out offerings and bows to the gods before the speakers start, on the old idea that the gods like a bit of noise and colour as well. They describe it as inviting the Bodhisattva to put their hands up. You will not find that on a listings site, and the way in is to stay around long enough that someone brings you.

An electronic party at an abandoned temple after dark, the kind of night you only hear about from someone already on the inside.

And the pace to actually use any of it

None of this works on a long weekend. The reason it suits a nomad in particular is that ordinary life here is easy and cheap enough that it stops taking up your attention, which leaves you the one thing a holiday never has, which is time. You are not trying to fit the island into an itinerary. A Tuesday afternoon can go on a temple you passed on the way somewhere, or a party someone takes you to that you would never have found, and when a complete change of scenery is two hours away on the fast train, you can just go. The convenience is not really the point on its own, it is what leaves you room for everything else.

Taroko Gorge on the east coast, the sort of place you often get largely to yourself here. (Photo: Uwe Aranas, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Two honest catches

The money is worth being clear about, because you will hear things that sound like they contradict each other. Nobody is overcharging you, and there is no foreigner price. But the cheap version of Taiwan is the local one, and if you arrive booking everything in English from abroad you will pay a real premium for it. That is a cost of convenience rather than a cost of being foreign, and it drops away once you learn where people eat and rent. The numbers get their own piece.

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The other catch is quieter. You will hear about the tension with China far more from friends back home than from anyone around you. It is not completely invisible, there is an air-raid drill once a year and it comes up in the news, but daily life goes on as if it were not there. This August the drill cleared the streets for half an hour and throttled mobile data for the first time. Everyone I know spent it indoors on their home wifi, working.

So what Taiwan gives you is a stack of things that happen to sit in the same place, and the value is in the stack rather than any one of them. A rich country’s ease, an outdoors almost nobody has crowded, a real depth of history, and enough calm and low cost that you are left with the time to get down through all of it. That is why it works better for staying a while than for passing through, and why it suits people who would rather be handed a map and left to wander than have the good parts pointed out on the first day.

This guide is from the Taiwan Digital Nomad Community, a free Skool community where city guides, local intel and foreigner-friendly resources live, made for expats and digital nomads who want to know more about Taiwan. Come join us.