The first episode of a two-part travel series on Taiwan was broadcast on Monday on the US television program Eye on the Bay. The episode, titled “It’s Time for Taiwan,” was aired on CBS Channel 5 in San Francisco, California. The second part was broadcast on Tuesday.
The show, hosted by Emmy Award-winning presenter Liam Mayclem, traveled to Taiwan in April to discover why Lonely Planet, one of the world’s leading travel guides, picked the country as a top 10 destination.
Mayclem led a group of 20 people from the San Francisco Bay Area on a tour around the country, experiencing local food such as stinky tofu and steamed dumplings along the way.
“I have traveled a lot and I have not eaten this well,” one of the members of the group said on the show.
Mayclem also expressed delight at the trip, saying it was one of the best for him and one of the tastiest.
“The food in Taiwan is a mixture from all different cultures and each dish brings out the freshness of the ingredients used; even the way the food is placed on the plates conveys the culture of Taiwan,” he said.
The friendliness and enthusiasm of Taiwanese made a lasting impression, he said.
The group tour was advertised in the Bay Area in November last year by the Tourism Section of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office (TECO) in San Francisco.
A new tour, scheduled to run from Feb. 21 to March 2 next year, and also to be led by Mayclem, is now being advertised in a joint effort between the Tourism Bureau and the US Automobile Association, the TECO said at the launch of the package tour in San Francisco on Monday.
The main theme of the trip would be the Taiwanese Lantern Festival, which is set to be held in Hsinchu in February, though it would also include a visit to Sun Moon Lake (日月潭) in Nantou County, the TECO said.
A decision to describe a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement on Singapore’s Taiwan policy as “erroneous” was made because the city-state has its own “one China policy” and has not followed Beijing’s “one China principle,” Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tien Chung-kwang (田中光) said yesterday. It has been a longstanding practice for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to speak on other countries’ behalf concerning Taiwan, Tien said. The latest example was a statement issued by the PRC after a meeting between Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on the sidelines of the APEC summit
The Taipei Zoo on Saturday said it would pursue legal action against a man who was filmed climbing over a railing to tease and feed spotted hyenas in their enclosure earlier that day. In videos uploaded to social media on Saturday, a man can be seen climbing over a protective railing and approaching a ledge above the zoo’s spotted hyena enclosure, before dropping unidentified objects down to two of the animals. The Taipei Zoo in a statement said the man’s actions were “extremely inappropriate and even illegal.” In addition to monitoring the hyenas’ health, the zoo would collect evidence provided by the public
A road safety advocacy group yesterday called for reforms to the driver licensing and retraining system after a pedestrian was killed and 15 other people were injured in a two-bus collision in Taipei. “Taiwan’s driver’s licenses are among the easiest to obtain in the world, and there is no mandatory retraining system for drivers,” Taiwan Vision Zero Alliance, a group pushing to reduce pedestrian fatalities, said in a news release. Under the regulations, people who have held a standard car driver’s license for two years and have completed a driver training course are eligible to take a test
Taiwan’s passport ranked 34th in the world, with access to 141 visa-free destinations, according to the latest update to the Henley Passport Index released today. The index put together by Henley & Partners ranks 199 passports globally based on the number of destinations holders can access without a visa out of 227, and is updated monthly. The 141 visa-free destinations for Taiwanese passport holders are a slight decrease from last year, when holders had access to 145 destinations. Botswana and Columbia are among the countries that have recently ended visa-free status for Taiwanese after “bowing to pressure from the Chinese government,” the Ministry