Taroko Gorge, marble cut by a river

The **Liwu River** has spent millions of years cutting down through a mountain of marble, and the result is a canyon so narrow in places that the road has to tunnel straight through the rock. Taroko is Taiwan's most dramatic landscape: grey and white cliffs streaked with folded stone, a jade-coloured river far below, and swifts wheeling between the walls. The **Swallow Grotto** section is the classic ten minutes on foot, with pot-holes drilled into the cliff face by water and wind; the **Tunnel of Nine Turns** switchbacks along the deepest, tightest stretch of the gorge. Other highlights sit just off the road. The **Eternal Spring Shrine** perches over a waterfall that falls straight into the river, commemorating the workers who died building the Central Cross-Island Highway. The *Shakadang Trail* follows a shallow blue tributary past boulders the size of houses, easy enough for anyone. The Baiyang trail ends at a water curtain inside a tunnel, and the vertiginous **Zhuilu Old Road** — a metre-wide ledge cut 500 metres above the valley floor — is the one experienced hikers come for, with a permit. Taroko is reached from **Hualien**, an hour up the coast road that runs beneath the **Qingshui Cliffs**, where the mountains drop almost sheer into the Pacific. The gorge is also Truku territory, and the indigenous villages and roadside stalls around Tianxiang are part of what makes the valley feel lived in rather than staged. Typhoons and earthquakes regularly close individual trails and sections here, so check current conditions before you go — and build in time for the rest of Taiwan's east coast.