I want to talk about why Taipei, Taiwan is my favorite city to ride a bicycle
although I live and work in Japan, I visit Taiwan every year for some cycling
it has everything! From fantastic views, mountains, flat cycling paths, and amazing food!
Why I love cycling in Taipei, Taiwan
Good morning guys, my name is Cruise! I'm here in Taipei, Taiwan today.
It's 6AM, and the roads are busy with a lot of loud bikes.
today, I want to talk about why Taipei is my favorite city for cycling.
I'm here in Taipei for work, it's the Taipei Cycle Show
I just announced my new job
take a look at the video I made
I'm working for a Japanese bicycle parts distributor, mainly with BMC Switzerland
brands and stuff and see if we can find any new product and while I'm here I
couldn't pass up the opportunity to go for a ride
I love Taiwan I love Taipei I love cycling here I come here every year I've
come here every year for the last four years
I love the cycling here in Taiwan and I wanted to share with you guys why Taipei
is my favorite city for cycling one of the biggest reasons is exactly where I'm
standing right now you can see I'm on the river path and there's a huge
network of paths here this is just a small small small portion of the river
paths available here in Taipei they're amazing they're super high quality
they're separated from the rest of traffic surrounded by nature surrounded
by grass there's even lights up at the top so you can ride it at night and
along the whole way there's exercise facility basketball
courts so everyone can enjoy it in other parts there's separate sections for
joggers and for cyclists and the more busy sections and Taiwan also has a
bunch of rivers and you can see they even have ramps to connect you to over
all the bridges and it's a super convenient system we're going to be
going along the river pass today on today's ride and I'm gonna keep talking
about why I love cycling in Taipei why I love cycling in Taiwan so come along
join along and let's get going
continuing on the topic of river paths as you can see this is just absolutely
beautiful we've got a bunch of facilities off to the side some baseball
here I know this has nothing to do with cycling but it does help throw the
cycling lifestyle for people who do other sports and are active in other
ways it just allows everyone to get out have a good time whether you're just a
kid whether you're trying to just get to your basketball game whether you're
trying to get to your soccer game or whether you're serious cyclist or jogger
everyone can come out enjoy this path and like I mentioned there's hundreds of
kilometres of cycling past here and Taipei and also a bunch throughout the
rest of Taiwan they put a huge amount of work into building the cycling
infrastructure and I just love it so much the other great thing about cycling
in Taipei here is you can see over to the sides here we are surrounded by
mountains no matter which direction you go in in Taipei there's mountains to the
north to the east to the west and to the south today's ride we're not actually
going into the mountains but yesterday I did the same thing woke up early one for
my 6 a.m. ride and I went into the mountains and had a blast the mountains
are so close to the inner city roads like you can get there within 30 minutes
especially if you take the hot path along the river if you're in the heart
of the city within 30 minutes you can be in a super steep mountain and some of
the surrounding mountains peak at about 800 meters so there's some pretty big
mountains nearby which is awesome to be in the capital city and to also be able
to get into the countryside get into the mountains right away have the
convenience the best of both worlds usually one disadvantage of living in a
mountainous area is there's no flat roads like you pretty much have
mountains or nothing but that's not the case here in Taipei because you can see
you can get all your flat work done on these river paths you can have a nice
rest day and then you can train hard in the mountains on your others days so
great balance of both is this supposed to be like I love you
you love I it's kind of backwards and we're splitting two ways here I'm not
sure which way to go let's take a look at the map I think we're gonna go left
and follow the river also with the river Pass here you can see we've got the path
here on this side we've also got the same path on the other side so
again tons of rivers here in Taipei and all of it you can see is green let's
zoom in a little bit all of it is well-maintained I love green
I love seeing grass I love being surrounded by nature so being able to
have this within the city is great I think again I live in Japan and we do
have some River pass but none of them are really maintained to this extent
they're just kind of left in rough state for the most part also I just noticed we
have the Taipei 101 tower over there we just had dinner there last night on the
85th floor man that was a crazy experience beautiful up there great
dinner and really being spoiled here and my first international trip here to
Taipei anyway let's continue on with our ride
another great facility for cyclists here public restrooms everywhere pretty much
every kilometer they have at least one these are kind of the standard types but
they have some nice ones as well where you can fit your bikes in but gonna take
a quick potty break right now so this is my bike today I'm on a felt carbon some
of you guys who are fans of the channel will recognize this is the bike that I
used in my Taiwan cycling trip from last year so yeah if you haven't checked out
our cycling videos here in Taiwan from before I'll link the playlist here I
brought my wife with me last year and we did a whole bunch of fun rides around
Taiwan especially beautiful Dover in the Hawaiian area the taroko gorge
absolutely beautiful check out the playlist if you're interested in more
videos about cycling in Taiwan anyway back to the bike as you guys know now
I'm working for BMC in Japan so I mentioned before this channel isn't just
gonna be a big advertisement for BMC I'm just gonna ride whatever bikes available
if something's interesting and I want to review it I'm gonna share it on the
channel so today I'm very grateful to have this bike any bike is better than
no bike and you can see this bike has definitely been used this bike has
definitely been loved we've got some old-school Shimano all Tiger in here
with the cables coming in from the inside I got my GoPro on the front
Garmin up in the front and this is the bottle we got from the giant store in
quale in when we did our cycling trip last year also on the SPD's today and
the mountain bike shoes i've got a mix of brands right now I've got my
specialized shoes and yeah mountain bike shoes are just way more convenient when
I'm going on these travel trips and need to walk around a lot letsa just look at
this this is this is absolutely insane we're right in the center of a massive
City but we're surrounded by nature we've got all the space it's nice and
quiet one of the other things I absolutely love about this kind of
facility is just it brings people together it brings people who are
exercising running cycling all to the same place so you can be surrounded by
people who are passionate about the same thing that you're passionate about
sometimes cyclists are kind of lonely creatures and we like to be alone for a
while but and that's true for me sometimes but other times I I kind of
get a strange feeling if I'm alone cycling for too long I kind of like
being able to see other cyclists to be able to pass other cyclists is a good
feeling it's a motivational feeling it makes
feel like yeah I'm going hard and that's something that I really strongly feel
when I'm here there's always people out on the river pass when I was out in the
mountain route yesterday I passed at least 10 people and this was just some
random Mountain Road on the east side of Taipei at 6:00 in the morning and I saw
all these people when I'm cycling in Japan there's not really the standard
route that everyone goes to there's not really a safe place that people can
gather to go cycling so it's kind of lonely at times because you don't run
into people but on the other hand that's a nice thing at other times but
ultimately I'm really jealous of this facility here in Taipei that everyone
can come out and ride another great thing I see here in Taipei is the number
of female cyclists there's no female cyclists in Japan if there are they're
always with their boyfriend or they're sort of being forced to go out and ride
with her boyfriend like they get them a bike and stuff and there's no safe place
for them to go together it's kind of a little bit dangerous and intimidating
for women to go out and cycle on their own and depend because the roads are so
narrow and it is a little bit dangerous it's actually illegal to cycle side by
side in Japan so it makes it really hard for new riders to come out and enjoy
cycling but here it's so safe like you can go out you don't have to worry about
cars you don't have to worry about an accident everyone can come out it's
great to see more women riders it's great to see more children out here it's
great to see families out here cycling together you can get a snack at a
vending machine you can go to the restroom you can get a drink and it's
just a nice safe place for people to come out and I think this is really
important if you want to have a thriving cycling culture in your city you need to
help build the infrastructure and unfortunately Japan's not really focused
on building that infrastructure right now cycling is not a priority for them
but building a place like this you see more people having an active lifestyle
more women going out cycling more families going out cycling together and
and if you get your children out cycling at an early age hopefully they enjoy the
sport they want to continue it and it becomes a lifelong hobby for them and of
course there's a bunch of cities that have these amazing cycling roads
probably even better than the Taiwan one but the other good thing I like about
this one is that it's not too crowded so some of those other ones might be a
little bit too crowded I haven't experienced them yet so there might be
better in other places I don't know but for me my favorite city that I've cycled
in so far it has to be Taipei I've come back every year and I've just really
enjoyed it I'm sure there's other great places out there in the world that I
just haven't had a chance to go to yet and hopefully I'll get to go to those
places but if you're looking for an interesting place to go for your next
cycling trip and you haven't been to I wanted before I strongly recommend
coming to check it out come check out Taipei it's a huge city lots of things
to offer lots of normal tourist attractions so if you come with your
family you can enjoy the regular tudor stuff and you can also get out for your
nice ride in the morning early in the morning get your early morning right in
before the family fun and yeah there's so many other things that I haven't even
touched on on this video like the food the night markets there's so many great
things that Taipei has to offer the hot springs and I just don't have enough
time to talk about it in today's video I'm actually running out of time from my
ride I got to get back to work and I got to make my way back pretty soon so I
want to get out and get more of my ride in and stop talking so that's going to
be the end for today's video if you're interested in more videos about cycling
in Taiwan cycling in Japan life in Japan be sure to subscribe to the channel and
we'll see you next time here on tool Cruz later guys and thanks for watching