Taipei, the noodle city with a cat-village day trip

Taipei is the capital of Taiwan, a dense, walkable city on the north end of the island with an MRT that covers everything, food at every price point, and a serious set of day trips out into the Keelung mountains. This list focuses on what I actually went to: the Houtong Cat Village day trip on the Pingxi line, three noodle stops in town, and a small canal-side walk.

On this page

• Getting in from TPE
• The Houtong Cat Village day trip
• Where to eat
• A quiet walk along the Wulixue canal

Getting in from TPE

Taoyuan International Airport (TPE) sits about 40 km southwest of Taipei. The Airport MRT is the default ride into town, and on most arrivals it is faster and cleaner than a taxi.

Mode	Time	Cost	When to use
Airport MRT (Taoyuan MRT)	35 min express, 50 min commuter	NT$150 (~$5 USD)	The default. Runs every 7 to 15 minutes from inside the terminals to Taipei Main Station. Express trains have luggage racks
Uber / taxi	40 to 60 min	NT$1,200 to NT$1,500 (~$40 to $50 USD)	Worth it with a late arrival or heavy bags
THSR (high-speed rail) via Taoyuan THSR	20 to 25 min	NT$160 + Airport MRT fare	Useful only if you are continuing south to Taichung, Tainan, or Kaohsiung the same day

Get an EasyCard from any MRT station vending machine on arrival. NT$100 for the card plus whatever you load on it. It works on the MRT, buses, convenience stores, and the TRA train you take to Houtong below.

The Houtong Cat Village day trip

Houtong Cat Village sits in Ruifang District, about an hour northeast of Taipei by train, and it is the strongest day trip out of the city if you like cats. The walk from the train station crosses a covered footbridge over the tracks into a hillside village that is half old mining houses, half cat life. The village has a few cafes, a couple of shops selling small things, and at least one stall selling cat food in small packets. Otherwise the attraction is the cats. There are hundreds. You pet them, you feed them, you take photos. About two to three hours is a normal visit.

The history is worth knowing before you go. Houtong was one of Taiwan's biggest coal mining towns through the early and mid twentieth century, with peak output around 220,000 tons a year, the largest single-area output on the island. At its peak the village had about 900 households and over 6,000 people. The mines closed in the 1990s as Taiwan's coal industry collapsed, the workers left for jobs elsewhere, and Houtong went from a working town to a near-empty one. The cats had been kept to control rats in the mines and around the storehouses, and when the people left, the cats stayed. In 2008 a local cat lover named Peggy Chien started photographing the strays and their caretakers and posting the photos online. The pictures went viral across Taiwan, then internationally. A volunteer association formed to feed and care for the colony, the train station was rebuilt with cat-themed signage, and the village rebranded itself around the animal that had outlasted the industry. National Geographic and Lonely Planet have both written about it since. It is one of a small set of places worldwide that has built a tourism economy around stray cats.

Getting there. From Taipei Main Station, take the TRA East Coast line to Ruifang (about 40 minutes on a local train, faster on a Taroko or Puyuma express), then transfer to the Pingxi branch line for Houtong (about 10 minutes, two stops). Some trains run directly through from Taipei to the Pingxi line without the Ruifang change. Check the schedule on the TRA app the night before. The whole ride is about NT$76 (around $2.50 USD) each way on the EasyCard.

The Pingxi line continuation. Houtong is the first stop on the Pingxi branch. The line continues to Shifen (waterfall and sky-lantern shops), Pingxi (the small old street where the sky-lantern festival happens around Lunar New Year), and Jingtong (the end of the line, a quiet old mining station). If you have a full day and want to chain stops, do Houtong in the morning and Shifen in the afternoon, then return to Taipei in the evening. A single combined ticket covers all the Pingxi-line stops if you ride more than once.

Where to eat

Taipei beef noodles are the city's signature dish, and the casual sit-down rooms are some of the best money you can spend on food in Asia. The picks below are the ones on this list, in rough order of price.

Spot	What it is	Price band
Niou Dien Beef Noodles	The beef-noodle bowl, casual sit-down room	NT$200 ($6 USD)
Lao Shandong Homemade Noodles	Hand-pulled-noodle spot with a Shandong-province lean	NT$150 to $250 ($5 to $8 USD)
Chef Hung Beef Noodle Soup	The Michelin-recognized chain version of the dish, slightly fancier room	NT$300 to $500 ($10 to $16 USD)

Bring small cash. Most small noodle rooms in Taipei take card or EasyCard now, but a few still run cash-only at lunch.

A quiet walk along the Wulixue canal

Wulixue Irrigation Canal is the small canal-side park in the city, a short walk where you trade the noise for a quieter Taipei. It is the kind of stop that does not show up in the standard guidebook lists but works well as a break between MRT-driven sightseeing days.