BY ANGIE TEO AND ANN WANG
ALISHAN. – Nearly a hundred passengers hopped aboard an old steam train in Taiwan this week, as the annual cherry blossom season entered full swing in the island’s scenic mountains.
The special blossom-themed train chugged up Alishan, in the southern part of the island, for a scenic six-hour journey on a heritage line that dates from Japanese colonial times and was originally a logging railway.
“It’s quite novel and the cherry blossoms are really beautiful,” said train passenger Chang Ya-Jou.
“When the steam train turns, the view out there is magnificent, especially when it passes by the snow-capped Yushan. It’s truly beautiful,” Ya-Jou said, referring to Taiwan’s highest peak which is nearby.
The narrow gauge railway is one of Taiwan’s most popular tourist attractions, and only fully re-opened last year following damage from typhoons and earthquakes.
This is the eighth time the special train has been organised.
Taiwan will report a 3 percent year-on-year increase in the number of foreign visitors arriving in the country in the first quarter of this year, according to a preliminary estimate released by the country’s Tourism Administration.
In the estimate, the agency said Taiwan’s foreign arrivals during the January-March period will top 2.1 million, up 3 percent year-on-year, with the number of visitors from South Korea, the Americas and Europe expected to surpass 2019 levels, before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Citing the numbers in January, the agency said, foreign visitors to Taiwan totaled 651,078, up 10.36 percent from a year earlier, with the January number equivalent to about 75 percent of the same period in 2019.
Since 2024, visitors from South Korea and Japan have accounted for about 30 percent of Taiwan’s total foreign arrivals, while countries in Southeast Asian, including Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam as well as India have made up an additional 30 percent, the agency’s data showed. – Reuters
