Offbeat Taipei and Beyond: 3 Days
Every Taipei-to-Taiwan itinerary treats Jiufen as the automatic day trip. This one doesn’t. Two full days cover the city, then the third goes to Pinglin instead, the tea town Taipei’s own tap water quietly depends on, and considerably quieter than a lantern-lit staircase full of tour groups on a weekend. Three days is exactly enough to give the city and one real day trip their own space.
Book these before you go
- Taipei 101 observatory ticket , NT$600 standard
- National Palace Museum timed-entry ticket , NT$350
Day 1: temples, towers, and a correction
Morning: Longshan Temple in Wanhua, thick with incense and locals rather than tour groups. From there, Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and Liberty Square, free grounds, the changing-of-the-guard ceremony worth timing around. Lunch: beef noodle soup, NT$150-400 depending on the shop’s fame.
Afternoon: Taipei 101. Correction the internet keeps getting wrong: world’s tallest building only 2004-2010, before Dubai’s Burj Khalifa. The 88F ticket is NT$600; skip the roughly NT$3,000 outdoor Skyline 460 add-on and hike Elephant Mountain at golden hour instead for the same skyline, free.
Evening: a night market. Raohe or Ningxia over Shilin for a better food-to-crowd ratio; stinky tofu (NT$50-70) is the rite of passage.
Day 2: museums, old streets, and Ximending
Morning: National Palace Museum, NT$350, one of the world’s genuinely great collections of Chinese imperial art. Spend a full morning; it rewards slow wandering.
Afternoon: Beitou, direct on the Xinbeitou MRT branch, free public foot baths and the eerily steaming Thermal Valley. Defensible opinion: Beitou beats an overcrowded Jiufen for a half-day, similar payoff, a fraction of the tour buses.
Evening: Ximending for dinner and street life; Din Tai Fung if you haven’t tried it, homegrown Taiwanese since 1958, not an import, NT$500-800 per person.
Day 3: Pinglin, the tea town everyone skips for Jiufen
This is the day most itineraries hand to Jiufen automatically. Give it to Pinglin instead. A public bus from Xindian MRT station gets you there in roughly an hour; there’s no direct train, which is exactly why it stays this quiet. Pinglin sits inside the watershed feeding Feitsui Reservoir, Taipei’s main drinking-water source, and that protection has kept the town low-rise and unhurried while Jiufen filled with tour buses.
Spend the day on the old street’s tea-egg stalls and the Pinglin Tea Museum, a low-key case for Taiwan’s actual tea capital that a Taipei teahouse can’t make as convincingly. If lantern-lit alleys are still non-negotiable for you, Jiufen remains genuinely worth a weekday morning; on a weekend, this itinerary’s pick will treat you far better.
Three days at a glance
| Day | Focus | Distance/time from central Taipei |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Longshan Temple, CKS Memorial, Taipei 101, Elephant Mountain | In the city |
| 2 | National Palace Museum, Beitou, Ximending | Beitou: direct MRT |
| 3 | Pinglin tea town | ~1 hr by bus from Xindian MRT |
Why Pinglin over Jiufen specifically?
Jiufen is genuinely beautiful and earned its reputation honestly, but weekends and holidays turn its staircases into a slow shuffle of shoulders and selfie sticks. Pinglin needs a bus rather than a train, which filters out the day-tripping crowds almost entirely, and its actual product, tea, gives the day a throughline that a photo-op alley doesn’t.
Do I need cash in Pinglin?
Yes, essential. The EasyCard covers the bus from Xindian, but the old street’s tea-egg stalls and smaller tea shops are largely cash-only, same as Taipei’s own night markets.
Base yourself in Ximending or Zhongshan for easy MRT and bus access to everything above, including the Xindian connection out to Pinglin. Cash matters throughout, and the MRT bans eating or drinking, water included, in paid areas, fines NT$1,500-7,500. For a longer version of this same gateway idea, see the 4-day itinerary , which adds the north coast properly.