My knee problem ends up being one of those mysterious injuries that seem serious but gets a lot better after a night’s rest. It’s sore in the morning and only mildly painful when we set off. It is cooler, finally. And we have a great tailwind, so while we perhaps should rest, we just can’t pass up the opportunity to make the most of the conditions we’ve been praying for. Once I’m on the bike, cycling loosens the knee up and it feels mostly fine.

We divert off the official bike route so that we are travelling with the wind at our backs in the most direct way. We are now concerned with completing this half of the island without lingering, since it’s becoming increasingly less scenic as we’ve gone on. It takes us onto some quieter roads, away from all the traffic lights. It also takes us passed an amazing, and massive, Taoist temple which we would have missed otherwise.

On our penultimate stop in the west we land a great value hotel, and they give us an upgrade just because. Though prices skyrocket at the weekend, during the week hotels in Taiwan can be really cheap for what you get. It’s possible to find really nice places for not much more than the cost of some campsites in Australia. The one we find in this city even offers free ice cream in the afternoon. Breakfast is also included, as it often is. I wake up not really feeling like noodles with braised pork, or congee, which are the usual offerings, so I sit with a coffee wondering if I’ll be able to figure out the strange toasters they have here. Then Richard tells me there are fried dumplings around the corner, so I appear there like a Romulan Warbird suddenly uncloaking.

There’s a bike shop round the corner who are able to fix my front hub while we wait, we both get new chains and now feel ready for the second half of cycling here.

We have a brutal day into a headwind as we make an attempt to see the far south of the island on this side. We are probably the only people in history to have found a headwind heading south in Taiwan in October. Richard asks at the end of it “Is that top 20?” which means he is asking if the day ranks in the twenty worst cycling days we have had. It was terrible, but he has recency bias. I am a pro at misery, and have an elephant’s memory for it, so I can quickly reel off twenty days which have been worse. However, at the beginning of the day a young lad on a moped spontaneously hands us the drinks he just bought while we’re beside him (for ages) at some traffic lights. They are smoothie type affairs, one he explains is melon and the other I don’t catch, but seems like a kind of carrot milk or yoghurt shake. These kind of cold drinks are sold everywhere at stalls, served in large paper cups with a sealed plastic film on the top that every stall and shop has a machine to create. And at the end of the day we pass the 20,000 mile marker.

Now we are in the southern part of Taiwan, we decide that we’re not going to ride round in a complete circuit. The wind goes in the same direction on both sides – North to South – and having tasted riding against it I am staunchly, categorically not going to do that all the way up the other coast. It doesn’t even need debating, Richard has no desire to make things wretched either. We get train tickets to the outskirts of Taipei, so that we then cross over and ride the other half of the island going south.

At the station we meet a pair of German cyclists who have just finished their time in Taiwan, and are getting the train to Taipei, followed by a flight back to Germany. It’s interesting to compare notes. Firstly about the traffic lights and the insanity of them. Overall, they are very meh about Taiwan. I agree to some extent; if you measure it against expectations and reputation, and if you compare it to some other places it doesn’t quite match up. Everything has been good but not amazing; sevens out of tens across the board. The huge but for us is that we haven’t been to the east coast yet, which is far and away supposed to be better in every respect. They have ridden that side, and when asked were not terribly impressed. They confirmed it is better, but did not blow them away. While I don’t take their word as gospel, with the gorge closed I am now a bit worried that Taiwan might be a bit of a damp squib.

When we get back to the north, the weather has completely changed. It’s so cool in the evening that we think nothing of walking for a couple of hours to the old part of town just to wander the streets. We take a day off and have a nice ride along a river bike path, back to the old street, and then coffee and cake in anticipation of Richard’s birthday. I feel so much happier and am so much looking forward to the rest of our time here.

And after checking the official website, news sites and forums several times a day in vain, someone posts the news on a travel page that Taroko Gorge is going to open. And then it’s official. The landslide had caused a dam and a new lake to form, which flooded parts of the road and some of the tunnels. Heavy machinery and lots of work have now broken through the landslide dam, letting the water flow down to the ocean. There are probably some days to clear the debris, and maybe some repairs, but there’s a good chance we will get to cycle some of it. I read about a tourist lamenting that the gorge will never be the same again after the 2024 earthquake, and now this landslide. But it’s a gorge, formed by the force of nature and ever changing. I think we might just get lucky enough to see it, and I’ll be grateful for that.

There’s another disused railway tunnel in Taiwan’s north east that has been turned into a bikeway, and we cannot pass this up. It’s about two kilometres long, less dank than the previous one, has railway tracks painted onto the path leading through and station announcements being played at intervals in the background. It’s very well restored and a worthwhile spot to visit. We emerge at the other end directly on the coast. It’s an overcast day of angry skies, which suits the dramatic, rocky shoreline.

The bike route is shittily signposted as usual, and is actually just a main road. Once again we have fallen prey to assumptions. We thought that since this is the less populated side of the island, with towns much smaller and far fewer of them, that it would not be as busy. But we get a shock as tankers and lorries barrel past us constantly, sometimes crossing the line into our space when there is a bike lane, and the rest of the time squeezing past us where there is no designated space for us to ride. Some of them are going too fast to stop at red lights, so they just blare their horns and carry on.

Things get calmer as we head into our destination town for the evening and we can take little roads rather than stay on the highway. It’s relaxed and very provincial after the behemoth cities in the west.

The night is cool, so we head out for a wander around the night market. It’s Halloween and a Friday night, and there are lots of parents with young children in fancy dress walking through the stalls and alleys. Much like a pumpkin outside the house at home, shops and stalls put a devil’s fork out to signal that they’re giving away sweets for the kids.

The next part of the route down the coast is known as “The Highway Of Death” among local cyclists, and when we look into what it’s like to ride a bike on it, receive advice including “if you cycle that you will die.” Counter to what we usually do, we decided not to ride the worst section of it – the part that goes through long tunnels with no shoulder.

It’s an hour’s journey on a train to skip this section, and I feel absolutely no shame in taking it. I also have a sense of urgency in getting to Taroko Gorge. Since Taiwan gets thrown meteorological and geological calamities with regularity, we’d be foolish to get complacent.

A playlist for the ride: