Pause and Wander

Dates: March 19th-22nd, 2026

Location: Sun Moon Lake, Taiwan

After three hours on the highway from Taipei, our private driver dropped us at Sun Moon Lake, a mountain-ringed reservoir in central Taiwan that gets its name from its shape: the eastern portion round like the sun, the western portion curved like the moon. It’s Taiwan’s largest body of freshwater and one of its most famous scenic destinations. We were staying at a place called Sun Moon Tea B&B, which was also a tea shop. The owner greeted us warmly, poured samples of a few different teas, and then gestured toward what looked like a shelf full of knickknacks and tea ceremony paraphernalia. 

We all raised our eyebrows at each other. What was she doing?

Then with a flourish she surreptitiously pressed a small button underneath the shelf and the entire wall pulled away, revealing a hidden door. Yes, we had speakeasy entrance to our hotel room.

And that wasn’t where the bizarreness ended.

There were technically five levels to this room. A landing. Two steps down to a bedroom area. A stairway up to a lofted second bedroom. A different stairway to an even higher level above the loft that wasn’t accessible from the loft itself, leading to a sitting area. And if you went around the corner from the sitting area, a couple steps up to a bathroom with a shower and the tiniest soaking tub you’ve ever seen—Max could barely fit sitting down with his knees folded up to his chest.

The vibe was very much Japanese style. Minimalist design. Mattresses resting directly on a floor platform. Little screens separating various areas.

It took a few minutes to get used to. We kept going up the wrong stairway, expecting to reach our loft and ending up in the bathroom instead.

Once we’d sorted out the architecture of our accommodation, we rented bikes for the following day and then headed out to find dinner. Shaina had scoped out a Thai fusion place delightfully called “A Feng Shi Restaurant”, and the menu looked promising: stir-fried morning glories, pork knuckle, fried chicken thigh, crystal lake shrimp, papaya salad with passionfruit. We ordered all of it.

The shrimp were the clear winner. About the size of a quarter, deep fried whole, coated in seasoning that was a tiny bit spicy and absolutely delicious. Mixed with the morning glories or the papaya salad it was genuinely great. Less stellar were the pork knuckles, which had a ton of fat that hadn’t rendered to the point where they couldn’t be enjoyed despite the flavor being excellent. The ratio was just too far gone.

Then we discovered that several of the chicken pieces were undercooked in the middle, and that was that. Appetites gone, plates pushed to the center, tab requested.

On the walk back to the Airbnb we passed Longfeng Temple, its exterior covered in elaborate gilded decorations. What drew us in wasn’t the architecture but the sound. Someone inside was keeping a steady beat on a drum—we approached to find  kneeling woman drumming consistently with her left hand and periodically striking a bowl-shaped gong with her right. We don’t know how long she’d been at it before we arrived, but we continued for at least ten minutes and she never broke rhythm once. We took a few photos and a video before leaving, still able to hear the beat as we headed off into the dark. 

We woke up the next morning, everyone having slept quite poorly. Missi complained of vivid, frightening dreams about the crystal lake shrimp from the previous night’s dinner crawling around inside her. Maybe her creepy dreams were so intense that they kept us all up! We got moving anyway, ate a banana and some Taiwanese pineapple bread, mounted up on the bikes, and headed out.

We planned our trip to Sun Moon Lake with high hopes, having been told by a confident ChatGPT that it was the “Lake Tahoe of Taiwan.”  We arrived at SML at the tail end of dry season. The water level was very low, leaving an exposed ring around the shoreline that took some of the polish off what should have been a spectacular setting. There was a haze in the air that took away from the crisp mountain views we’d expected. We had planned to bike around most of the lake, but many sections of the path were in disrepair and closed off. However, the path on the western side of the lake was decently well maintained, and the water itself did have a striking almost glowing blue to it from the dissolved minerals. The views out over the water and surrounding mountains were lovely regardless.

We biked about 8 km along the shoreline trail, all five of us on regular bikes with Missi on a pedal-assist e-bike. We turned around at the trail’s end, did a few drone shots, and spent some time goofing around making Zoolander faces and dancing on bikes, which is its own kind of entertainment. At one point Max put the drone into autonomous follow mode and let it track us along the serpentine path. It flew behind us the whole way, maintaining position through the curves and even passing cleanly under a bridge archway without any input. All in all, this was a pretty fun excursion, but Sun Moon Lake is certainly no Lake Tahoe.

That evening, we decided to go “full local” and eat at 7-Eleven for dinner. Prepackaged meals heated up in the store’s dedicated microwaves, which are genuinely good in Taiwan. The only problem was the eating situation. There was no eating area in the store or really anywhere else so we ended up eating inside the store and on the front porch like absolute savages.

When we went inside to find a trash can, the attendant looked at us and pointed upstairs. Upstairs? The 7-Eleven had an entire dining room on the second floor that we had been completely unaware of.

The attendant was too polite to say anything about the odd foreigners he’d watched eat in his store, but his expression said plenty.

You don’t know what you don’t know until you know.

On our third day we bought ferry passes and made it to the dock, at a run and down many stairs, something we’d sworn we wouldn’t do to Nana again, with barely a few minutes to spare. The first thing you pass on the water is Lalu Island, a small island sitting in the center of the lake. This is the sacred heart of the Thao people, the indigenous group who have called Sun Moon Lake home for generations.

According to their founding legend, Thao hunters chased a white deer through the mountains for days until it led them to this lake, where they found fish in abundance and decided this was their home. Lalu means “sacred mountain of the heart” in the Thao language and is believed to be the dwelling place of their highest ancestral spirits. The island is closed to visitors entirely. You can only observe it from a distance on the ferry. We passed it quietly on the ferry and kept going.

First stop on foot was Xuanguang Temple, a Buddhist temple perched right at the lake’s edge, then up the trail into the hills to the Ci’en Pagoda, a twelve-story golden-red tower standing at exactly 1,000 meters above sea level. Chiang Kai-shek had it built in 1971 in memory of his mother, getting construction materials there by shipping everything across the lake and hauling it up the mountain. The views from the top were outstanding. Lalu Island and the full curve of the lake laid out below, surrounding mountains in every direction. We climbed to the very top and got the drone up around the tower for a few shots.

Then back down to the ferry and across to Ita Thao, the main lakeside village of the Thao people. They number fewer than a thousand today, making them one of the smallest officially recognized indigenous groups in Taiwan. Their village at the water’s edge has become thoroughly intertwined with tourism, but their culture and ceremonies are still very much alive. We grabbed lunch at a local spot nearby, xiao long bao and stir-fried vegetables and noodles, generous and delicious, then walked the Yidashao Lakeside Trail to the Nine Frogs Stack at the far end. Nine frog statues stacked one on top of the other, each representing a frog-shaped feature in the surrounding hills. They function as an informal water level indicator: the more frogs visible above the waterline, the lower the lake. Right now, with dry season almost over, quite a few of them were showing. An oddly charming water gauge.

By our last morning, a sewer smell that had been building steadily through the stay had become a pronounced presence, apparently not limited to our property but drifting up from something going on beneath the whole village. We were up at 6:45, coffee, tea, cookies, and while everyone finished packing, Max walked down to the bus station to confirm our 9:30 departure. The attendant said the 9:30 bus was still on time, but she pointed at the bus idling right in front of the office and said the 8:00 bus was leaving in twenty minutes.

Since we were already packed this was an easy call. We checked out, walked a short distance, and loaded up.

Sun Moon Lake is a place that probably rewards a different time of year. At the tail end of dry season the water was low, the haze was persistent, and the jaw-dropping views we’d been expecting turned out to be kinda pretty. But we biked the shoreline. We flew the drone under a bridge. We watched a woman keep perfect rhythm on a drum for reasons we’ll never fully understand. We learned about the Thao people and the island at the center of the lake that belongs entirely to them. And we eventually figured out that 7-Elevens have upstairs dining rooms.

Not every place is going to be a favorite. Some places are just… fine. Some places have a persistent sewer smell and a five-level Airbnb with a secret door.

Sun Moon Lake was both of those things. We’re glad we went, we made the best of it, and we were equally glad to leave.

Tomorrow, we head to Tainan, considered the soul of Taiwan, and our hopes are equally high.