Taipei Bike Tours: A Flat 15 km, and What You See From the Saddle

Breakfast first, and it matters

The morning starts at a neighbourhood breakfast shop rather than a café: danbing, the rolled egg pancake most of Taipei eats standing up, youtiao, and hot soy milk. It is included, it is the real thing, and it sets the tone for a tour that mostly visits places people use rather than places built for visitors.

From there the group is fitted to bikes and helmets and rides out at a pace the slowest rider sets. Nine people is the cap, which in practice means the group stays together at lights.

What the 15 km links together

The route threads working neighbourhoods and monuments in one loop, all of it flat.

• Shuanglian morning market: produce, meat and clothes, busiest before nine, ridden through slowly rather than around.
• Wenchang Temple, tucked inside the market and dedicated to the deity of literature and study.
• Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall on Liberty Square, timed where possible for the changing of the guard.
• Jingfu Gate, the surviving east gate of the old walled city, on its traffic island.
• The Presidential Office Building, built under Japanese rule and still in use.
• Longshan Temple, the busiest working temple in the city, incense and all.
• The Tamsui riverside bikeway, a wide separated path with open sky and no traffic.
• Dihua Street, the nineteenth-century trading row for herbs, dried goods, fabric and tea.
• Xiahai Temple on Dihua Street, where people pray for a love life and free tea is poured.

Why it works on your first morning

Taipei is confusing at ground level and legible from a bike, and this is the only one of the tours leaving Taipei city that stays inside it all morning. Four hours covering 15 km gives you the shape of the city, where the river runs, how far the old town sits from Xinyi, and which neighbourhoods you want to come back to on foot.

The guide also spends the ride handing over practical detail that a walking tour rarely gets to: which market to shop, where to eat at nine at night, which MRT exit puts you where. Book it for day one rather than day four.

The riverside network

Taipei has more than 100 km of riverside bikeway along the Tamsui, Keelung, Xindian and Jingmei rivers, built on the flood plains behind the levees. Access is through gates in the embankment, which is why the paths are invisible from the street and empty compared with the city above them.

On the roads themselves cycling is legal and common but scooters dominate, so a first-timer is better served by the river path and the marked lanes than by the arterials.

When to ride, and when not to

October to April is the comfortable window: highs from 19°C in January to the mid-twenties in April, and the driest months of the year. July and August days pass 34°C with humidity to match, which turns a flat 15 km into hard work by ten in the morning.

• Best months: late October to early April, with November and March the sweet spots.
• Plum rain in May and June brings a week or more of grey drizzle at a time.
• Typhoon season runs June to October and cancels rides outright rather than delaying them.
• Morning departures beat afternoon ones in every month, and by a wide margin in summer.
• The tour runs rain or shine, with a poncho supplied; only extreme weather warnings cancel it.

Who it suits

Anyone who can ride a bike and is at least 150 cm tall. There is no fitness requirement beyond four hours of flat pedalling with frequent stops, and the pace is set by the group, not the guide. It is a poor fit if you have never ridden in traffic at all, since the route crosses city streets between the market and the river, and there are stretches where nine riders share the road with scooters.