Taiwan 2010– Overnight Train (Day 1)

We booked ourselves an overnight train from Taipei to Taitung. It is a journey that lasts 7 hours. At the planning stages, it seemed like it would have saved us a lot of time but to be honest, it was damn tiring to have to wait 5 hours for the train’s departure. It was like we were travelling the whole day.

On hindsight, we should have opted for the later TPE arrival time that will leave us with less time to burn. With too much time to burn, we took time to slack at starbucks at Taipei Main Station – at least they had couches there (and wifi too!).

We brought up our baggage from the lockers, recharged our phones and changed into slippers. Because we weren’t sure how the trains here worked, we down to wait for the train about 1 hour before they arrived.

We were booked on the faster Tze Chiang Express but it seemed like there was only the Lu Guang Express. Weird.

We also noticed that the time allowance to board the train was also very short and there was a need to constantly listen out for the announcement to tell you which train has arrived. Of course, the train timings were also very accurate so you could still board based on timing.

When we boarded the train, we realised we were put on the business class seats because we paid the higher fare for the Tze Chiang Express. The seats were definitely wide and comfy. The only gripe was that they don’t switch off the lights so we had to bury ourselves under the jacket.

Otherwise it was a pretty comfortable ride with pretty generous recline on the seats. A plus point was that our station was the terminal station, so we could afford to sleep through the entire ride.