One of the must-dos on every mainland visitor's list is the Shi Lin Night Market in Taipei, usually on the last day of a hectic 10-day round-Island tour. Here, many of Taiwan's iconic "little eats", or street snacks, wait to tempt tourists.
Eight of us are trudging up a mountain ridge into thinning air. Soft, green grass shrouds the steep but graceful slopes that surround us. Near the end of a hike in a vertical field of wildflowers, the purple and yellow blossoms become dotted with familiar white star-shapes. At about 3,000 meters above sea level, our steps come more slowly but we are not hallucinating.
Traveling on the Indian Pacific is an exhilarating adventure and a great eye-opener as it rolls across the diversity of the Australian landscape. The 4,352-kilometer transcontinental journey from Sydney to Perth takes three nights and three days, or approximately 65 hours, and transports the visitor from the stunning Blue Mountains, the Great Dividing Range, the salt lakes and sand dunes of South Australia to the longest straight stretch of rail track across the Nullarbor Plain.
If my Australian colleague Tym did not send me an e-mail giving me tips on traveling in Perth, I would have written the city on the west coast of Australia off my itinerary. Like most Chinese tourists, my knowledge of Down Under was limited to the east coast, with its well-known attractions such as Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane, the Great Barrier Reef ?
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